The World S Last Night And Other Essays

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Lewis, Clive

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THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT
AND OTHER ESSAYS

ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS

The Screwtape Letters

Miracles
The Problem of Pain

Transposition
The Pilgrim's Regress

The Great Divorce

George MacDonald: An Anthology

The Abolition of Man

Mere Christianity

Surprised by Joy

Reflections on the Psalms

For Children
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

The Horse and His Boy

The Magician's Nephew

The Last Battle

Fiction
Out of the Silent Planet

Perelandra

That Hideous Strength
Till We Have Faces

The World's Last Night

AND OTHER ESSAYS BY

C. S. Lewis

Harcourt, Brace and Company New York

1952, i955> 1 9$> J 959> 1 9 Q b 7 c - s - Lewis
"Screwtape Proposes a Toast" copyright 1959 by Helen Joy Lewis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form or by any mechanical means,

including mimeograph and tape recorder, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

first edition

"The Efficacy of Prayer*' appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (January,
1 959) " n Obstinacy in Belief," a paper read to the Socratic Club,
Oxford, in The Sewanee Review (Autumn, 1955); "Lilies That Fester"
in The Twentieth Century (April, 1955); "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"
in The Saturday Evening Post (December, 1959); "Good Work and
Good Works" in Catholic Art Quarterly (Christmas, 1959); "Religion
and Rocketry" in Christian Herald (as "Will We Lose God in Outer
Space?") (April, 1958); "The World's Last Night" in Religion in Life
(as "The Christian Hope Its Meaning for Today") (Winter, 1952).

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-5439
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

ONE: THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER: 3
TWO: ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF'. 1$

THREE: LILIES THAT FESTER: 51

FOUR: SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST; 51

FIVE: GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS: ^1

SIX*. RELIGION AND ROCKETRY: 83
SEVEN: THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT: 93

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT
AND OTHER ESSAYS

ONE THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

years ago I got up
one morning Intending to have my hair cut in prepara-
tion for a visit to London, and the first letter I opened
made it clear I need not go to London. So I decided to
put the haircut off too. But then there began the most
unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a
voice saying, "Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut/*
In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my
barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of
many troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes
been able to help. The moment I opened his shop door
he said, "Oh, I was praying you might come today/'
And in fact if I had come a day or so later I should have
been of no use to him.

It awed me; it awes me still. But of course one cannot
rigorously prove a causal connection between the bar-
ber's prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It
might be accident.

I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thigh-
bone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriv-
ing colonies of the disease in many other bones as well.

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

It took three people to move her In bed. The doctors
predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often
know better), a few weeks. A good man laid his hands
on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking
(uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man
who took the last X-ray photos was saying, "These
bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous/'

But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine,
as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We
need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsifi-
cation of its prophecies. You need not, unless you
choose, believe in a causal connection between the pray-
ers and the recovery.

The question then arises, "What sort of evidence
would prove the efficacy of prayer?" The thing we pray
for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not
going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indis-
putably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle
had occurred because of your prayers. The answer
surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we
have in the sciences can never be attained.

Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity
of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established
by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without
exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people
prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not
prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer.
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct
from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes
grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable "success"
in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all.
It would prove something much more like magic a
power in certain human beings to control, or compel,
the course of nature.

There are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament
which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable
granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they
really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet
a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the
holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a cer-
tain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the
idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infal-
lible gimmick may be dismissed.

Other things are proved not simply by experience but
by those artificially contrived experiences which we call
experiments. Could this be done about prayer? I will
pass over the objection that no Christian could take part
in such a project, because he has been forbidden it:
"You must not try experiments on God, your Master."
Forbidden or not, is the thing even possible?

I have seen it suggested that a team of people the
more the better should agree to pray as hard as they
knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients
in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then
you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures
and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the
experiment at various times and places so as to elimi-
nate the influence of irrelevant factors.

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer
could go on under such conditions. "Words without
thoughts never to heaven go/' says the King in Hamlet.
Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team o
properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for
our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of
the sick unless the end you have in view is their recov-
ery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recov-
ery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those
in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering
should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what
happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of
your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever
your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not
praying. The experiment demands an impossibility.

Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtain-
able. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if
we remember that prayer is request and compare it with
other specimens of the same thing.

We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as
of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we
ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays,
we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we
ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not
nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with sci-
entific certainty a causal connection between the ask-
ing and the getting.

Your neighbour may be a humane person who would
not have let your cat starve even if you had forgotten to
make any arrangement* Your employer is never so

6

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

likely to grant your request for a raise as when he is
aware that you could get better money from a rival
firm and is quite possibly intending to secure you by a
raise in any case. As for the lady who consents to marry
y OU are you sure she had not decided to do so already?
Your proposal, you know, might have been the result,
not the cause, of her decision. A certain important con-
versation might never have taken place unless she had
intended that it should.

Thus in some measure the same doubt that hangs
about the causal efficacy of our prayers to God hangs also
about our prayers to man. Whatever we get we might
have been going to get anyway. But only, as I say, in
some measure. Our friend, boss, and wife may tell us
that they acted because we asked; and we may know
them so well as to feel sure, first that they are saying
what they believe to be true, and secondly that they un-
derstand their own motives well enough to be right.
But notice that when this happens our assurance has not
been gained by the methods of science. We do not try
the control experiment of refusing the raise or breaking
off the engagement and then making our request again
under fresh conditions. Our assurance is quite different
in kind from scientific knowledge. It is born out of our
personal relation to the other parties; not from know-
ing things about them but from knowing them.

Our assurance if we reach an assurance that God
always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that
apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only
come in the same sort of way. There can be no question

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide
whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted
for by chance. Those who best know a man best know
whether, when he did what they asked, he did it be-
cause they asked. I think those who best know God will
best know whether He sent me to the barber's shop be-
cause the barber prayed.

For up till now we have been tackling the whole
question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The
very question "Does prayer work?" puts us in the wrong
frame of mind from the outset. "Work'*: as if it were
magic, or a machine something that functions auto-
matically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal
contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (our-
selves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the
sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it;
confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its
sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of
God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us.
That He answers prayers is a corollary not necessarily
the most important one from that revelation. What
He does is learned from what He is.

Petitionary prayer is, nonetheless, both allowed and
commanded to us: "Give us our daily bread/* And no
doubt it raises a theoretical problem. Can we believe
that God ever really modifies His action in response to
the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does
not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness
needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any
of those things that are done by finite agents, whether

8

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our
bodies miraculously without food; or give us food with-
out the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowl-
edge without the aid of learned men; or convert the
heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils
and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and
wills of men to co-operate in the execution of His will.
"God/' said Pascal, "instituted prayer in order to lend
to His creatures the dignity of causality/' But not only
prayer; whenever we act at all He lends us that dignity.
It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers
should affect the course of events than that my other ac-
tions should do so. They have not advised or changed
God's mind that is, His over-all purpose. But that pur-
pose will be realized in different ways according to the
actions, including the prayers, o His creatures. /

For He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can
possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to
do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly
and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect
what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not
fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite
free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to in-
volve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdica-
tion. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are
either privileged to share in the game or compelled to
collaborate in the work, "to wield our little tridents/'
Is this amazing process simply Creation going on before
our eyes? This is how (no light matter) God makes
something indeed, makes gods out of nothing.

9

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

So at least it seems to me. But what I have offered
can be, at the very best, only a mental model or symbol.
All that we say on such subjects must be merely analog-
ical and parabolic. The reality is doubtless not compre-
hensible by our faculties. But we can at any rate try to
expel bad analogies and bad parables. Prayer is not a
machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God.
Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our
other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God
Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.

It would be even worse to think of those who get what
they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who
have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of
Christ in Gethsernane is answer enough to that. And I
dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard
from an experienced Christian: "I have seen many strik-
ing answers to prayer and more than one that I thought
miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: be-
fore conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life
proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are
not only more frequent; they become more unmistak-
able, more emphatic."

Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best?
Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tor-
tured death, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" When God
becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least com-
forted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery
here which, even if I had the power, I might not have
the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like
you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, be-

10

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

yond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty
conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger,
we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver,
we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more
desperate posts in the great battle.

11

TWO - ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

CAPERS have more than
once been read to the Socratic Club at Oxford in which
a contrast was drawn between a supposedly Christian
attitude and a supposedly scientific attitude to belief.
We have been told that the scientist thinks it his duty
to proportion the strength of his belief exactly to the
evidence; to believe less as there is less evidence and to
withdraw belief altogether when reliable adverse evi-
dence turns up. We have been told that, on the contrary,
the Christian regards it as positively praiseworthy to be-
lieve without evidence, or in excess of the evidence, or
to maintain his belief unmodified in the teeth of stead-
ily increasing evidence against it. Thus a "faith that
has stood firm," which appears to mean a belief immune
from all the assaults of reality, is commended.

If this were a fair statement of the case, then the co-
existence within the same species of such scientists and
such Christians would be a very staggering phenome-
non. The fact that the two classes appear to overlap, as
they do, would be quite inexplicable. Certainly all dis-
cussion between creatures so different would be hope-

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

less. The purpose of this essay is to show that things are
really not quite so bad as that. The sense in which sci-
entists proportion their belief to the evidence, and the
sense in which Christians do not, both need to be de-
fined more closely. My hope is that when this has been
done, though disagreement between the two parties
may remain, they will not be left staring at one another
in wholly dumb and desperate incomprehension.

And first, a word about belief in general. I do not see
that the state of "proportioning belief to evidence" is
anything like so common in the scientific life as has been
claimed. Scientists are mainly concerned not with be-
lieving things but with finding things out. And no one,
to the best of my knowledge, uses the word "believe"
about things he has found out. The doctor says he "be-
lieves" a man was poisoned before he has examined the
body; after the examination, he says the man was poi-
soned. No one says that he believes the multiplication
table. No one who catches a thief red-handed says he
believes that man was stealing. The scientist, when at
work, that is, when he is a scientist, is labouring to es-
cape from belief and unbelief into knowledge. Of course
he uses hypotheses or supposals. I do not think these are
beliefs. We must look, then, for the scientist's behaviour
about belief not to his scientific life but to his leisure
hours.

In actual modern English usage the verb "believe/'
except for two special usages, generally expresses a
very weak degree of opinion. "Where is Tom?" "Gone
to London, I 'believe/' The speaker would be only

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

mildly surprised if Tom had not gone to London after
all. "What was the date?" "430 B.C., I believe/' The
speaker means that he is far from sure. It is the same
with the negative if it is put in the form "I believe not."
("Is Jones coming up this term?" "I believe not/') But
if the negative is put in a different form it then becomes
one of the special usages I mentioned a moment ago.
This is of course the form "I don't believe it," or the
still stronger "I don't believe you/' "I don't believe it"
is far stronger on the negative side than "I believe" is
on the positive. "Where is Mrs. Jones?" "Eloped with
the butler, I believe/' "I don't believe it/' This, espe-
cially if said with anger, may imply a conviction which
in subjective certitude might be hard to distinguish
from knowledge by experience. The other special usage
is "I believe" as uttered by a Christian. There is no
great difficulty in making the hardened materialist un-
derstand, however little he approves, the sort of mental
attitude which this "I believe" expresses. The material-
ist need only picture himself replying, to some report
of a miracle, "I don't believe it," and then Imagine this
same degree of conviction on the opposite side. He
knows that he cannot, there and then, produce a refuta-
tion of the miracle which would have the certainty of
mathematical demonstration; but the formal possibility
that the miracle might after all have occurred does not
really trouble him any more than a fear that
water might not be H and O. Similarly, the Christian
does not necessarily claim to have demonstrative proof;
but the formal possibility that God might not exist is

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

not necessarily present in the form of the least actual
doubt. Of course there are Christians who hold that
such demonstrative proof exists, just as there may be
materialists who hold that there is demonstrative dis-
proof. But then, whichever of them is right (if either is)
while he retained the proof or disproof would be not
believing or disbelieving but knowing. We are speaking
of belief and disbelief in the strongest degree, but not
of knowledge. Belief, in this sense, seems to me to be
assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelm-
ingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of
doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute.

It may be asked whether belief (and of course disbe-
lief) of this sort ever attaches to any but theologi-
cal propositions. I think that many beliefs approximate
to it; that is, many probabilities seem to us so strong that
the absence of logical certainty does not induce in us the
least shade of doubt. The scientific beliefs of those who
are not themselves scientists often have this character,
especially among the uneducated. Most of our beliefs
about other people are of the same sort. The scientist
himself, or he who was a scientist in the laboratory, has
beliefs about his wife and friends which he holds, not
indeed without evidence, but with more certitude than
the evidence, if weighed in the laboratory manner,
would justify. Most of my generation had a belief in the
reality of the external world and of other people if
you prefer it, a disbelief in solipsism far in excess
of our strongest arguments. It may be true, as they now
say, that the whole thing arose from category mistakes

16

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

and was a pseudo-problem; but then we didn't know
that In the twenties. Yet we managed to disbelieve
in solipsism all the same.

There is, of course, no question so far of belief with-
out evidence. We must beware of confusion between the
way in which a Christian first assents to certain proposi-
tions and the way in which he afterwards adheres to
them. These must be carefully distinguished. Of the
second it is true, in a sense, to say that Christians do rec-
ommend a certain discounting of apparent contrary
evidence, and I will later attempt to explain why. But
so far as 1 know it is not expected that a man should
assent to these propositions in the first place without evi-
dence or in the teeth of the evidence. At any rate, if any-
one expects that, I certainly do not. And in fact, the
man who accepts Christianity always thinks he had good
evidence; whether, like Dante, fisici e metafisici argo-
menti, or historical evidence, or the evidence of reli-
gious experience, or authority, or all these together. For
of course authority, however we may value it in this or
that particular instance, is a kind of evidence. All of our
historical beliefs, most of our geographical beliefs,
many of our beliefs about matters that concern us in
daily life, are accepted on the authority of other human
beings, whether we are Christians, Atheists, Scientists, or
Men-in-the-Street.

It is not the purpose of this essay to weigh the evi-
dence, of whatever kind, on which Christians base their
belief. To do that would be to write a full-dress apolo-
gia. All that I need do here is to point out that, at the

17

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

very worst, this evidence cannot be so weak as to war-
rant the view that all whom it convinces are indifferent
to evidence. The history of thought seems to make
this quite plain. We know, in fact, that believers are
not cut off from unbelievers by any portentous inferior-
ity of intelligence or any perverse refusal to think.
Many of them have been people of powerful minds.
Many of them have been scientists. We may suppose
them to have been mistaken, but we must suppose that
their error was at least plausible. We might, indeed,
conclude that it was, merely from the multitude and
diversity of the arguments against it. For there is not
one case against religion, but many. Some say, like
Capaneus in Statius, that it is a projection of our primi-
tive fears, primus in orbe decs fecit timor: others, with
Euhemerus, that it is all a "plant" put up by wicked
kings, priests, or capitalists; others, with Tylor, that it
comes from dreams about the dead; others, with Frazer,
that it is a by-product of agriculture; others, like Freud,
that it is a complex; the moderns that it is a category
mistake. I will never believe that an error against which
so many and various defensive weapons have been
found necessary was, from the outset, wholly lacking in
plausibility. All this "post haste and rummage in the
land" obviously implies a respectable enemy.

There are of course people in our own day to whom
the whole situation seems altered by the doctrine of the
concealed wish. They will admit that men, otherwise
apparently rational, have been deceived by the argu-
ments for religion. But they will say that they have been

18

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

deceived first by their own desires and produced the ar-
guments afterwards as a rationalization: that these ar-
guments have never been intrinsically even plausible,
but have seemed so because they were secretly
weighted by our wishes. Now I do not doubt that this
sort of thing happens in thinking about religion as in
thinking about other things; but as a general explana-
tion of religious assent it seems to me quite useless. On
that issue our wishes may favour either side or both.
The assumption that every man would be pleased, and
nothing but pleased, if only he could conclude that
Christianity is true, appears to me to be simply prepos-
terous. If Freud is right about the Oedipus complex,
the universal pressure of the wish that God should not
exist must be enormous, and atheism must be an ad-
mirable gratification to one of our strongest suppressed
impulses. This argument, in fact, could be used on the
theistic side. But I have no intention of so using it. It
will not really help either party. It is fatally ambivalent.
Men wish on both sides: and again, there is fear-fulfil-
ment as well as wish-fulfilment, and hypochondriac tem-
peraments will always tend to think true what they most
wish to be false. Thus instead of the one predicament on
which our opponents sometimes concentrate there are
in fact four. A man may be a Christian because he wants
Christianity to be true. He may be an atheist because
he wants atheism to be true. He may be an atheist be-
cause he wants Christianity to be true. He may be a
Christian because he wants atheism to be true. Surely
these possibilities cancel one another out? They may be

19

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

of some use in analysing a particular instance of belief
or disbelief, where we know the case history, but as a
general explanation of either they will not help us. I
do not think they overthrow the view that there is evi-
dence both for and against the Christian propositions
which fully rational minds, working honestly, can assess
differently.

I therefore ask you to substitute a different and less
tidy picture for that with which we began. In it, you re-
member, two different kinds of men, scientists, who
proportioned their belief to the evidence, and Chris-
tians, who did not, were left facing one another across a
chasm. The picture I should prefer is like this. All men
alike, on questions which interest them, escape from
the region of belief into that of knowledge when they
can, and if they succeed in knowing, they no longer say
they believe. The questions in which mathematicians
are interested admit of treatment by a particularly clear
and strict technique. Those of the scientist have their
own technique, which is not quite the same. Those of
the historian and the judge are different again. The
mathematician's proof (at least so we laymen suppose)
is by reasoning, the scientist's by experiment, the his-
torian's by documents, the judge's by concurring sworn
testimony. But all these men, as men, on questions out-
side their own disciplines, have numerous beliefs to
which they do not normally apply the methods of their
own disciplines. It would indeed carry some suspicion
of morbidity and even of insanity if they did. These be-
liefs vary in strength from weak opinion to complete

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

subjective certitude. Specimens of such beliefs at their
strongest are the Christian's "I believe" and the con-
vinced atheist's "I don't believe a word of it. JJ The par-
ticular subject-matter on which these two disagree does
not, of course, necessarily involve such strength of belief
and disbelief. There are some who moderately opine
that there is, or is not, a God. But there are others whose
belief or disbelief is free from doubt. And all these be-
liefs, weak or strong, are based on what appears to the
holders to be evidence; but the strong believers or dis-
believers of course think they have very strong evidence.
There is no need to suppose stark unreason on either
side. We need only suppose error. One side has esti-
mated the evidence wrongly. And even so, the mistake
cannot be supposed to be of a flagrant nature; otherwise
the debate would not continue.

So much, then, for the way in which Christians come
to assent to certain propositions. But we have now to
consider something quite different; their adherence to
their belief after it has once been formed. It is here that
the charge of irrationality and resistance to evidence be-
comes really important. For it must be admitted at once
that Christians do praise such an adherence as if it
were meritorious; and even, in a sense, more meritorious
the stronger the apparent evidence against their faith
becomes. They even warn one another that such appar-
ent contrary evidence such "trials to faith" or "tempta-
tions to doubt" may be expected to occur, and deter-
mine in advance to resist them. And this is certainly
shockingly unlike the behaviour we all demand of the

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

scientist or the historian in their own disciplines. There,
to slur over or ignore the faintest evidence against a fa-
vourite hypothesis, is admittedly foolish and shameful.
It must be exposed to every test; every doubt must be
invited. But then I do not admit that a hypothesis is a
belief. And if we consider the scientist not among his
hypotheses in the laboratory but among the beliefs in
his ordinary life, I think the contrast between him and
the Christian would be weakened. If, for the first time,
a doubt of his wife's fidelity crosses the scientist's mind,
does he consider it his duty at once to entertain this
doubt with complete impartiality, at once to evolve a
series of experiments by which it can be tested, and to
await the result with pure neutrality of mind? No doubt
it may come to that in the end. There are unfaithful
wives; there are experimental husbands. But is such a
course what his brother scientists would recommend
to him (all of them, I suppose, except one) as the first
step he should take and the only one consistent with his
honour as a scientist? Or would they, like us, blame him
for a moral flaw rather than praise him for an intellec-
tual virtue if he did so?

This is intended, however, merely as a precaution
against exaggerating the difference between Christian
obstinacy in belief and the behaviour of normal people
about their non-theological beliefs. I am far from sug-
gesting that the case I have supposed is exactly parallel
to the Christian obstinacy. For of course evidence of the
wife's infidelity might accumulate, and presently reach
a point at which the scientist would be pitiably foolish

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

to disbelieve it. But the Christians seem to praise an
adherence to the original belief which holds out against
any evidence whatever. I must now try to show why such
praise is in fact a logical conclusion from the original be-
lief itself.

This can be done best by thinking for a moment of
situations in which the thing is reversed. In Christian-
ity such faith is demanded of us; but there are situations
in which we demand it of others. There are times when
we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only he will
trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a
thorn from a child's finger, in teaching a boy to swim
or rescuing one who can't, in getting a frightened be-
ginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal
obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them to
trust us In the teeth of their senses, their imagination,
and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that what
is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks
dangerous is their only safety. We ask them to accept
apparent impossibilities: that moving the paw farther
back into the trap is the way to get it out that hurting
the finger very much more will stop the finger hurting
that water which is obviously permeable will resist
and support the body that holding onto the only sup-
port within reach is not the way to avoid sinking that
to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way
not to fall. To support all these incredibilia we can rely
only on the other party's confidence In us a confidence
certainly not based on. demonstration, admittedly shot
through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers,

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

resting on nothing but such assurance as the look of
our face and the tone of our voice can supply, or even,
for the dog, on our smell. Sometimes, because of their
unbelief, we can do no mighty works. But if we succeed,
we do so because they have maintained their faith in us
against apparently contrary evidence. No one blames us
for demanding such faith. No one blames them for giv-
ing it. No one says afterwards what an unintelligent dog
or child or boy that must have been to trust us. If the
young mountaineer were a scientist, it would not be
held against him, when he came up for a fellowship,
that he had once departed from Clifford's rule of evi-
dence by entertaining a belief with strength greater
than the evidence logically obliged him to.

Now to accept the Christian propositions is ipso -facto
to believe that we are to God, always, as that dog or
child or bather or mountain climber was to us, only very
much more so. From this it is a strictly logical conclu-
sion that the behaviour which was appropriate to them
will be appropriate to us, only very much more so.
Mark: I am not saying that the strength of our original
belief must by psychological necessity produce such be-
haviour. I am saying that the content of our original be-
lief by logical necessity entails the proposition that such
behaviour is appropriate. If human life is in fact
ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our
real needs and of the way in which they can be satis-
fied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori
that His operations will often appear to us far from be-
neficent and far from wise, and that it will be our high-

24

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

est prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this.
This expectation is increased by the fact that when we
accept Christianity we are warned that apparent evi-
dence against it will occur evidence strong enough "to
deceive if possible the very elect/' Our situation is ren-
dered tolerable by two facts. One is that we seem to
ourselves, besides the apparently contrary evidence, to
receive favourable evidence. Some of it is in the form
of external events: as when I go to see a man, moved by
what I felt to be a whim, and find he has been praying
that I should come to him that day. Some of it is more
like the evidence on which the mountaineer or the dog
might trust his rescuer the rescuer's voice, look, and
smell. For it seems to us (though you, on your premisses,
must believe us deluded) that we have something like
a knowledge-by-acquaintance of the Person we be-
lieve in, however imperfect and intermittent it may
be. We trust not because "a God" exists, but because
this God exists. Or if we ourselves dare not claim
to "know" Him, Christendom does, and we trust at
least some of its representatives in the same way: be-
cause of the sort of people they are. The second fact is
this. We think we can see already why, if our original
belief is true, such trust beyond the evidence, against
much apparent evidence, has to be demanded of us. For
the question is not about being helped out of one trap
or over one difficult place in a climb. We believe that
His intention is to create a certain personal relation be-
tween Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but
analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic

25

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation
such trust as could have no room to grow except where
there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting
the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much
evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good
intentions only when they are proved. No man is our
friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence
against them. Such confidence, between one man and
another, is in fact almost universally praised as a moral
beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspi-
cious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not ad-
mired for the excellence of his logic.

There is, you see, no real parallel between Christian
obstinacy in faith and the obstinacy of a bad scientist
trying to preserve a hypothesis although the evidence
has turned against it. Unbelievers very pardonably
get the impression that an adherence to our faith is like
that, because they meet Christianity, if at all, mainly in
apologetic works. And there, of course, the existence
and beneficence of God must appear as a speculative
question like any other. Indeed, it is a speculative ques-
tion as long as it is a question at all. But once it has been
answered in the affirmative, you get quite a new situa-
tion. To believe that God at least this God exists is
to believe that you as a person now stand in the pres-
ence of God as a Person. What would, a moment before,
have been variations in opinion, now become variations
in your personal attitude to a Person. You are no longer
faced with an argument which demands your assent,
but with a Person who demands your confidence. A

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

faint analogy would be this. It is one thing to ask in
vacua whether So-and-So will join us tonight, and an-
other to discuss this when So-and-So 's honour is pledged
to come and some great matter depends on his coming.
In the first case it would be merely reasonable, as the
clock ticked on, to expect him less and less. In the sec-
ond, a continued expectation far into the night would
be due to our friend's character if we had found him
reliable before. Which of us would not feel slightly
ashamed if, one moment after we had given him up, he
arrived with a full explanation of his delay? We should
feel that we ought to have known him better. ,

Now of course we see, quite as clearly as you, how
agonizingly two-edged all this is. A faith of this sort, if it
happens to be true, is obviously what we need, and it is
infinitely ruinous to lack it. But there can be faith of
this sort where it is wholly ungrounded. The dog may
lick the face of the man who comes to take it out of the
trap; but the man may only mean to vivisect it in South
Parks Road when he has done so. The ducks who come
to the call "Dilly, dilly, come and be killed" have confi-
dence in the farmer's wife, and she wrings their necks
for their pains. There is that famous French story of the
fire in the theatre. Panic was spreading, the spectators
were just turning from an audience into a mob. At that
moment a huge bearded man leaped through the or-
chestra onto the stage, raised his hand with a gesture full
of nobility, and cried, "Que chacun regagne sa place."
Such was the authority of his voice and bearing that
everyone obeyed him. As a result they were all burned

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

to death, while the bearded man walked quietly out
through the wings to the stage door, took a cab which
was waiting for someone else, and went home to bed.

That demand for our confidence which a true friend
makes of us is exactly the same that a confidence trick-
ster would make. That refusal to trust, which is sensi-
ble in reply to a confidence trickster, is ungenerous and
ignoble to a friend, and deeply damaging to our rela-
tion with him. To be forewarned and therefore fore-
armed against apparently contrary appearance is emi-
nently rational if our belief is true; but if our belief is
a delusion, this same forewarning and forearming
would obviously be the method whereby the delusion
rendered itself incurable. And yet again, to be aware of
these possibilities and still to reject them is clearly the
precise mode, and the only mode, in which our personal
response to God can establish itself. In that sense the
ambiguity is not something that conflicts with faith so
much as a condition which makes faith possible. When
you are asked for trust you may give it or withhold it;
it is senseless to say that you will trust if you are given
demonstrative certainty. There would be no room for
trust if demonstration were given. When demonstration
is given what will be left will be simply the sort of rela-
tion which results from having trusted, or not having
trusted, before it was given.

The saying "Blessed are those that have not seen and
have believed" has nothing to do with our original as-
sent to the Christian propositions. It was not addressed
to a philosopher enquiring whether God exists. It was

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

addressed to a man who already believed that, who al-
ready had long acquaintance with a particular Person,
and evidence that that Person could do very odd things,
and who then refused to believe one odd thing more,
often predicted by that Person and vouched for by all
his closest friends. It is a rebuke not to scepticism in the
philosophic sense but to the psychological quality of
being "suspicious." It says in effect, "You should have
known me better." There are cases between man and
man where we should all, in our different way, bless
those who have not seen and have believed. Our rela-
tion to those who trusted us only after we were proved
innocent in court cannot be the same as our relation to
those who trusted us all through.

Our opponents, then, have a perfect right to dispute
with us about the grounds of our original assent. But
they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the as-
sent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer
proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evi-
dence. They cannot of course be expected to know on
what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is al-
ways rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to
see how the quality of the object which we think we are
beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view
that if this were a delusion then we should have to say
that the universe had produced no real thing of compa-
rable value and that all explanations of the delusion
seemed somehow less important than the thing ex-
plained. That is knowledge we cannot communicate.
But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

from the logic of speculative thought into what might
perhaps be called the logic of personal relations. What
would, up till then, have been variations simply of opin-
ion become variations of conduct by a person to a Per-
son. Credere Deum esse turns into Credere in Deum.
And Deum here is this God, the increasingly knowable
Lord.

3

THREE - LILIES THAT FESTER

THE "Cambridge Num-
ber" of the Twentieth Century (1955) Mr. John Allen
asked why so many people "go to such lengths to
prove to us that really they are not intellectuals at all
and certainly not cultured." I believe I know the an-
swer. Two parallels may help to ease it into the reader's
mind.

We all know those who shudder at the word refine-
ment as a term of social approval. Sometimes they ex-
press their dislike of this usage by facetiously spelling it
refanement; with the implication that it is likely to be
commonest in the mouths of those whose speech has a
certain varnished vulgarity. And I suppose we can all
understand the shudder, whether we approve it or not.
He who shudders feels that the quality of mind and be-
haviour which we call refined is nowhere less likely to
occur than among those who aim at, and talk much
about, refinement. Those who have this quality are not
obeying any idea of refinement when they abstain from
swaggering, spitting, snatching, triumphing, calling
names, boasting or contradicting. These modes of be-

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

haviour do not occur to them as possibles: if they did,
that training and sensibility which constitute refinement
would reject them as disagreeables without reference to
any ideal of conduct, just as we reject a bad egg without
reference to its possible effect on our stomachs. Refine-
ment, in fact, is a name given to certain behaviour from
without. From within, it does not appear as refinement;
indeed, it does not appear, does not become an object
of consciousness, at all. Where it is most named it is
most absent.

I produce my next parallel with many different kinds
of reluctance. But I think it too illuminating to be omit-
ted. The word religion is extremely rare in the New
Testament or the writings of mystics. The reason is
simple. Those attitudes and practises to which we give
the collective name of religion are themselves con-
cerned with religion hardly at all. To be religious is to
have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neigh-
bour in relation to God, Therefore, almost by defini-
tion, a religious man, or a man when he is being reli-
gious, is not thinking about religion; he hasn't the time.
Religion is what we (or he himself at a later moment)
call his activity from outside.

Of course those who disdain the words refinement
and religion may be doing so from bad motives; they
may wish to impress us with the idea that they are well-
bred or holy. Such people are regarding chatter about
refinement or religion simply as symptomatic of vul-
garity or worldliness, and eschew the symptom to clear

3*

LILIES THAT FESTER

themselves from the suspicion of the disease. But there
are others who sincerely and (I believe) rightly think
that such talk is not merely a symptom of, but a cause
active in producing, that disease. The talk is inimical
to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists
and to prevent its birth where it is unborn.

Now culture seems to belong to the same class of dan-
gerous and embarrassing words. Whatever else it may
mean, it certainly covers deep and genuine enjoyment
of literature and the other arts. (By using the word en-
joyment 1 do not mean to beg the vexed question about
the role of pleasure in our experience of the arts. I mean
frui, not delectari; as we speak of a man "enjoy-
ing" good health or an estate.) Now if I am certain
of anything in the world, I am certain that while a
man is, in this sense, enjoying Don Giovanni or the
Oresteia he is not caring one farthing about culture.
Culture? the irrelevance of it! For just as to be fat or
clever means to be fatter or cleverer than most, so to be
cultured must mean to be more so than most, and thus
the very word carries the mind at once to comparisons,
and groupings, and life in society. And what has all that
to do with the horns that blow as the statue enters, or
Clytaemnestra crying, "Now you have named me
aright'? In Howard's End Mr. E. M. Forster excellently
describes a girl listening to a symphony. She is not
thinking about culture: nor about "Music"; nor even
about "this music." She sees the whole world through
the music. Culture, like religion, is a name given from

33

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

outside to activities which are not themselves interested
in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they
were.

I do not mean that we are never to talk of things from
the outside. But when the things are o high value and
very easily destroyed, we must talk with great care, and
perhaps the less we talk the better. To be constantly
engaged with the idea of culture, and (above all) of
culture as something enviable, or meritorious, or some-
thing that confers prestige, seems to me to endanger
those very "enjoyments" for whose sake we chiefly
value it. If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear,
see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured
thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements
in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy
art at all. We are calling up the desire for self-improve-
ment, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt
(from one group) and to agree (with another), and a
dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in
themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blind-
ing and paralysing distraction.

At this point some may protest that by culture they
do not mean the "enjoyments" themselves, but the
whole habit of mind which such experiences, re-acting
upon one another, and reflected on, build up as a per-
manent possession. And some will wish to include the
sensitive and enriching social life which, they think, will
arise among groups of people who share this habit of
mind. But this reinterpretation leaves me with the
same difficulty. I can well imagine a lifetime of such

34

LILIES THAT FESTER

enjoyments leading a man to such a habit of mind, but
on one condition; namely, that he went to the arts for
no such purpose. Those who read poetry to improve
their minds will never improve their minds by reading
poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous
and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses
will submit to no marriage of convenience. The desir-
able habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as
a by-product, unsought. The idea of making it one's aim
suggests that shattering confidence which Goethe made
to Eckermann: "In all my youthful amours the object
I had in view was my own ennoblement." To this, I
presume, most of us would reply that, even if we believe
a love-affair can ennoble a young man, we feel sure
that a love-affair undertaken for that purpose would fail
of its object. Because of course it wouldn't be a love-
affair at all.

So much for the individual. But the claims made for
the "cultured" group raise an embarrassing question.
What, exactly, is the evidence that culture produces
among those who share it a sensitive and enriching so-
cial life? If by "sensitive" we mean "sensitive to real or
imagined affronts/' a case could be made out. Horace
noted long ago that "bards are a touchy lot." The lives
and writings of the Renaissance Humanists and the cor-
respondence in the most esteemed literary periodicals
of our own century will show that critics and scholars
are the same. But sensitive in that meaning cannot be
combined with enriching. Competitive and resentful
egoisms can only impoverish social life. The sensitivity

35

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

that enriches must be of the sort that guards a man from
wounding others, not of the sort that makes him ready
to feel wounded himself. Between this sensitivity and
culture, my own experience does not suggest any causal
connection. I have often found it among the uncultured.
Among the cultured I have sometimes found it and
sometimes not.

Let us be honest. I claim to be one of the cultured
myself and have no wish to foul my own nest. Even if
that claim is disallowed, I have at least lived among
them and would not denigrate my friends. But we are
speaking here among ourselves behind closed doors.
Frankness is best. The real traitor to our order is not
the man who speaks, within that order, of its faults, but
the man who flatters our corporate self-complacency. I
gladly admit that we number among us men and women
whose modesty, courtesy, fair-mindedness, patience in
disputation and readiness to see an antagonist's point
of view, are wholly admirable. I am fortunate to have
known them. But we must also admit that we show as
high a percentage as any group whatever of bullies, par-
anoiacs, and poltroons, of backbiters, exhibitionists,
mopes, milksops, and world-without-end bores. The
loutishness that turns every argument into a quarrel is
really no rarer among us than among the sub-literate;
the restless inferiority-complex ("stern to inflict" but
not "stubborn to endure") which bleeds at a touch but
scratches like a wildcat is almost as common among us
as among schoolgirls.

If you doubt this, try an experiment. Take any one

36

LILIES THAT FESTER

of those who vaunt most highly the adjusting, cleans-
ing, liberating, and civilising effects of culture and ask
him about other poets, other critics, other scholars, not
in the mass but one by one and name by name. Nine
times out of ten he will deny of each what he claimed
for all. He will certainly produce very few cases in
which, on his own showing, culture has had its boasted
results. Sometimes we suspect that he can think of only
one. The conclusion most naturally to be drawn from
his remarks is that the praise our order can most
securely claim is that which Dr. Johnson gave to the
Irish. "They are an honest people; they never speak
well of one another."

It is then (at best) extremely doubtful whether cul-
ture produces any of those qualities which will enable
people to associate with one another graciously, loy-
ally, understandingly, and with permanent delight.
When Ovid said that it "softened our manners/' he was
flattering a barbarian king. But even if culture did all
these things, we could not embrace it for their sake.
This would be to use consciously and self-consciously,
as means to extraneous ends, things which must lose all
their power of conducing to those ends by the very fact
of being so used. For many modern exponents of cul-
ture seem to me to be "impudent" in the etymological
sense; they lack pudor, they have no shyness where men
ought to be shy. They handle the most precious and
fragile things with the roughness of an auctioneer and
talk of our most intensely solitary and fugitive experi-
ences as if they were selling us a Hoover. It is all really

37

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

very well summed up in Mr. Allen's phrase in the
Twentieth Century "the faith in culture/' A "faith in
culture" is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions
imply a turning away from those very things which cul-
ture and religion are about. "Culture" as a collective
name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible
word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made
into a faith, a cause, a banner, a "platform/' is unendur-
able. For none of the activities in question cares a straw
for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic
religion where names themselves were regarded as
powers.

Now a step further. Mr. Allen complained that, not
content with creeping out of earshot when we can bear
the voices of certain culture-mongers no longer, we then
wantonly consort, or pretend that we consort, with the
lowest of the low-brows, and affect to share their pleas-
ures. There are at this point (still p. 127) a good many
allusions which go over my head. I don't know what
A F N is, I am not fond of cellars, and modern whisky
suits neither my purse, my palate, nor my digestion.
But I think I know the sort of thing he has in mind, and
I think I can account for it. As before, I will begin with
a parallel. Suppose you had spent an evening among
very young and very transparent snobs who were feign-
ing a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though
anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had
ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a
grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home
you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard

LILIES THAT FESTER

an old body in a feather boa say to another old body,
with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea,
dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that
moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For
here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a
mind really concerned about that in which it expressed
concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be un-
debauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive,
from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead
lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry
party, where there have been cataracts of culture but
never one word or one glance that suggested a real en-
joyment of any art, any person, or any natural object,
my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is
reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious
of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that
I had met something real and live and unfabricated;
genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compul-
sive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy.
Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever
may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.
The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not
impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going
to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; per-
haps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or
Peke.

39

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

I should not have spent so many words on answering
Mr. Allen's question (neither o us matters sufficiently
to justify it) unless I thought that the discussion led to
something of more consequence. This I will now try
to develop. Mr. Forster feels anxious because he dreads
Theocracy. Now if he expects to see a Theocracy set up
in modern England, I myself believe his expectation to
be wholly chimerical. But I wish to make it very clear
that, if I thought the thing in the least probable, I
should feel about it exactly as he does. I fully embrace
the maxim (which he borrows from a Christian) that
"all power corrupts/' I would go further. The loftier
the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome,
inhuman, and oppressive it will be. Theocracy is the
worst of all possible governments. All political power
is at best a necessary evil: but it is least evil when its
sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it
claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets
itself strictly limited objectives. Anything transcen-
dental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethi-
cal, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to
meddle with our private lives. Let the shoemaker stick
to his last. Thus the Renaissance doctrine of Divine
Right is for me a corruption of monarchy; Rousseau's
General Will, of democracy; racial mysticisms, of na-
tionality. And Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is
the worst corruption of all. But then I don't think we
are in any danger of it. What I think we are really in
danger of is something that would be only one degree
less intolerable, and intolerable in almost the same way.

40

LILIES THAT FESTER

I would call it Charientocracy; not the rule of the saints
but the rule of the ^apt'orcs, the venustiores, the Hotel
de Rambouillet, the Wits, the Polite, the "Souls," the
"Apostles/' the Sensitive, the Cultured, the Integrated,
or whatever the latest password may be. I will explain
how I think it could come about.

The old social classes have broken up. Two results
follow. On the one hand, since most men, as Aristotle
observed, do not like to be merely equal with all other
men, we find all sorts of people building themselves
into groups within which they can feel superior to the
mass; little unofficial, self-appointed aristocracies. The
Cultured increasingly form such a group. Notice their
tendency to use the social term vulgar of those who dis-
agree with them. Notice that Mr. Allen spoke of rebels
against, or deserters from, this group, as denying not
that they are "intellectual" but that they are "intellec-
tuals/* not hiding a quality but deprecating inclusion in
a class. On the other hand, inevitably, there is coming
into existence a new, real, ruling class: what has been
called the Managerial Class. The coalescence of these
two groups, the unofficial, self-appointed aristocracy of
the Cultured and the actual Managerial rulers, will
bring us to Charientocracy.

But the two groups are already coalescing, because
education is increasingly the means of access to the
Managerial Class. And of course education, in some
sense, is a very proper means of access; we do not want
our rulers to be dunces. But education is coming to have
a new significance. It aspires to do, and can do, far more

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

to the pupil than education (except, perhaps, that of
the Jesuits) has ever done before.

For one thing, the pupil is now far more defenceless
in the hands of his teachers. He comes increasingly from
businessmen's flats or workmen's cottages in which there
are few books or none. He has hardly ever been alone.
The educational machine seizes him very early and or-
ganizes his whole life, to the exclusion of all unsuperin-
tended solitude or leisure. The hours of unsponsored,
uninspected, perhaps even forbidden, reading, the ram-
blings, and the "long, long thoughts" in which those of
luckier generations first discovered literature and na-
ture and themselves are a thing of the past. If a Tra-
herne or a Wordsworth were born to-day he would be
"cured" before he was twelve. In short, the modern pu-
pil is the ideal patient for those masters who, not con-
tent with teaching a subject, would create a character;
helpless Plasticine. Or if by chance (for nature will be
nature) he should have any powers of resistance, they
know how to deal with him. I am coming to that point
in a moment.

Secondly, the nature of the teaching has changed. In
a sense it has changed for the better: that is, it de-
mands far more of the master and, in recompense,
makes his work more interesting. It has become far
more intimate and penetrating; more inward* Not con-
tent with making sure that the pupil has read and re-
membered the text, it aspires to teach him apprecia-
tion. It seems harsh to quarrel with what at first sounds
so reasonable an aim. Yet there is a danger in it, Every-

42

LILIES THAT FESTER

one now laughs at the old test-paper with Its context
questions and the like, and people ask, "What good can
that sort of thing do a boy?" But surely to demand that
the test-paper should do the boy good is like demanding
that a thermometer should heat a room. It was the read-
ing of the text which was supposed to do the boy good;
you set the paper to find out if he had read it. And just
because the paper did not force the boy to produce, or
to feign, appreciation, it left him free to develop in pri-
vate, spontaneously, as an out-of-school activity which
would never earn any marks, such appreciation as he
could. That was a private affair between himself and
Virgil or himself and Shakespeare. Nine times out of
ten, probably, nothing happened at all. But whenever
appreciation did occur (and quite certainly it some-
times did) it was genuine; suited to the boy's age and
character; no exotic, but the healthy growth of its na-
tive soil and weather. But when we substitute exercises
in "practical criticism" for the old, dry papers, a new
situation arises. The boy will not get good marks
(which means, in the long run, that he will not get into
the Managerial Class) unless he produces the kind of
responses, and the kind of analytic method, which com-
mend themselves to his teacher. This means at best
that he is trained to the precocious anticipation of re-
sponses, and of a method, inappropriate to his years. At
worst it means that he is trained in the (not very dif-
ficult) art of simulating the orthodox responses. For
nearly all boys are good mimics. Depend upon it, before
you have been teaching for a term, everyone in the form

43

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

knows pretty well "the sort of stuff that goes down with
Prickly Pop-eye." In the crude old days they knew that
what "went down/' and the only thing that "went down"
was correct answers to factual questions, and there were
only two ways of producing those: working or cheating.

The thing would not be so bad if the responses which
the pupils had to make were even those of the individual
master. But we have already passed that stage. Some-
where (I have not yet tracked it down) there must be a
kind of culture-mongers' central bureau which keeps a
sharp look-out for deviationists. At least there is cer-
tainly someone who sends little leaflets to schoolmas-
ters, printing half a dozen poems on each and telling
the master not only which the pupils must be made to
prefer, but exactly on what grounds. (The imperti-
nence of it! We know what Mulcaster or Boyer would
have done with those leaflets.)

Thus to say that, under the nascent regime, educa-
tion alone will get you into the ruling class, may not
mean simply that the failure to acquire certain knowl-
edge and to reach a certain level of intellectual compe-
tence will exclude you. That would be reasonable
enough. But it may come to mean, perhaps means al-
ready, something more. It means that you cannot get
in without becoming, or without making your masters
believe that you have become, a very specific kind of
person, one who makes the right responses to the right
authors. In fact, you can get in only by becoming, in the
modern sense of the word, cultured. This situation must
be distinguished from one that has often occurred be-

44

LILIES THAT FESTER

fore. Nearly all ruling classes, sooner or later, in some
degree or other, have taken tip culture and patronized
the arts. But when that happens the culture is the result
of their position; one of the luxuries or privileges of
their order. The situation we are now facing will be al-
most the opposite. Entry into the ruling class will be the
reward of culture. Thus we reach Charientocracy.

Not only is the thing likely to happen; it is already
planned and avowed. Mr, J. W. Saunders has set it all
out in an excellent article entitled "Poetry in the Man-
agerial Age" (Essays in Criticism, iv, 3, July 1954). He
there faces the fact that modern poets are read almost
exclusively by one another. He looks about for a rem-
edy. Naturally he does not suggest that the poets should
do anything about it. For it is taken as basic by all the
culture of our age that whenever artists and audience
lose touch, the fault must be wholly on the side of the
audience. (I have never come across the great work in
which this important doctrine is proved.) The remedy
which occurs to Mr. Saunders is that we should provide
our poets with a conscript audience; a privilege last en-
joyed, I believe, by Nero. And he tells us how this can
be done. We get our "co-ordinators" through education;
success in examinations is the road into the ruling class.
All that we need do, therefore, is to make not just
poetry, but "the intellectual discipline which the critical
reading of poetry can foster/' the backbone of our edu-
cational system. In other words, practical criticism or
something of the sort, exercised, no doubt, chiefly on
modern poets, is to be the indispensable subject, failure

45

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

in which excludes you from the Managerial Class. And
so our poets get their conscript readers. Every boy or
girl who is born is presented with the choice: "Read the
poets whom we, the cultured, approve, and say the sort
of things we say about them, or be a prole/' And this
(picking up a previous point) shows how Charien-
tocracy can deal with the minority of pupils who have
tastes of their own and are not pure Plasticine. They get
low marks. You kick them off the educational ladder at a
low rung and they disappear into the proletariat.

Another advantage is that, besides providing poets
with a conscript audience for the moment, you can
make sure that the regnant literary dynasty will reign
almost forever. For the deviationists whom you have
kicked off the ladder will of course include all those
troublesome types who, in earlier ages, were apt to start
new schools and movements. If there had been a sound
Charientocracy in their day, the young Chaucer, the
young Donne, the young Wordsworth and Coleridge,
could have been dealt with. And thus literary history,
as we have known it in the past, may come to an end.
Literary man, so long a wild animal, will have become a
tame one.

Having explained why I think a Charientocracy prob-
able, I must conclude by explaining why I think it un-
desirable.

Culture is a bad qualification for a ruling class be-
cause it does not qualify men to rule. The things we
really need in our rulers mercy, financial integrity,
practical intelligence, hard work, and the like are no

46

LILIES THAT FESTER

more likely to be found in cultured persons than in any-
one else.

Culture is a bad qualification in the same way as
sanctity. Both are hard to diagnose and easy to feign. Of
course not every charientocrat will be a cultural hypo-
crite nor every theocrat a Tartuffe. But both systems
encourage hypocrisy and make the disinterested pur-
suit of the quality they profess to value more difficult.

But hypocrisy is not the only evil they encourage.
There are, as in piety, so in culture, states which, if less
culpable, are no less disastrous. In the one we have the
"Goody-goody"; the docile youth who has neither re-
volted against nor risen above the routine pietisms and
respectabilities of his home. His conformity has won
the approval of his parents, his influential neighbours,
and his own conscience. He does not know that he has
missed anything and is content. In the other, we have
the adaptable youth to whom poetry has always been
something "Set" for "evaluation." Success in this exer-
cise has given him pleasure and let him into the ruling
class. He does not know what he has missed, does not
know that poetry ever had any other purpose, and is
content.

Both types are much to be pitied: but both can some-
times be very nasty. Both may exhibit spiritual pride,
but each in its proper form, since the one has succeeded
by acquiescence and repression, but the other by re-
peated victory in competitive performances. To the
pride of the one, sly, simpering, and demure, we might
apply Mr. Allen's word "smug" (especially if we let in

47

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

a little of its older sense). My epithet for the other
would, I think, be "swaggering/ 7 It tends in my expe-
rience to be raw, truculent, eager to give pain, insatiable
in its demands for submission, resentful and suspicious
of disagreement. Where the goody-goody slinks and
sidles and purrs (and sometimes scratches) like a cat,
his opposite number in the ranks of the cultured gob-
bles like an enraged turkey. And perhaps both types are
less curable than the hypocrite proper. A hypocrite
might (conceivably) repent and mend; or he might be
unmasked and rendered innocuous. But who could
bring to repentence, and who can unmask, those who
were attempting no deception? who don't know that
they are not the real thing because they don't know
that there ever was a real thing?

Lastly I reach the point where my objections to
Theocracy and to Charientocracy are almost identical.
"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." The
higher the pretensions of our rulers are, the more med-
dlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be
and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be
defiled. The highest things have the most precarious
foothold in our nature. By making sanctity or culture a
may en de parvenir you help to drive them out of the
world. Let our masters leave these two, at least, alone;
leave us some region where the spontaneous, the un-
marketable, the utterly private, can still exist.

As far as I am concerned, Mr. Allen fell short of the
mark when he spoke of a "retreat from the faith in cul-
ture/' I don't want retreat; I want attack or, if you

48

LILIES THAT FESTER

prefer the word, rebellion. I write in the hope of rous-
ing others to rebel. So far as I can see, the question has
nothing to do with the difference between Christians
and those who (unfortunately, since the word has long
borne a useful, and wholly different, meaning) have
been called "humanists." I hope that red herring will
not be brought in. I would gladly believe that many
atheists and agnostics care for the things I care for. It is
for them I have written. To them I say: the "faith in
culture" is going to strangle all those things unless we
can strangle it first. And there is no time to spare.

49

FOUR
SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

(The scene is in Hell at the annual dinner of the
Tempters' Training College for young Devils. The
Principal , Dr. Slubgob, has just proposed the health of
the guests. Screw tape, a very experienced Devil, who is
the guest of honour, rises to reply:)

M

. R. PRINCIPAL, your Immi-
nence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentle-
devils:

It is customary on these occasions for the speaker to
address himself chiefly to those among you who have
just graduated and who will very soon be posted to offi-
cial Tempterships on Earth. It is a custom I willingly
obey. I will remember with what trepidation I awaited
my own first appointment. I hope, and believe, that each
one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career
is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should
be as Mine was one of unbroken success. If it is not,
you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic
element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must

5*

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

act as the lash and spur to your endeavors. How often
you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep! Yet at
the same time I would wish to put before you a moder-
ately encouraging view of the strategical situation as a
whole.

Your dreaded Principal has included in a speech full
of points something like an apology for the banquet
which he has set before us. Well, gentledevils, no one
blames him. But it would be vain to deny that the hu-
man souls on whose anguish we have been feasting to-
night were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skil-
ful cookery of our tormentors could make them better
than insipid.

Oh to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry
VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there;
something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only
just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious re-
sistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards
when you'd got it down.

Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was
a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally
I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passion-
ate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great
tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a
Little Man a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed
with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest
platitudes in his public utterances a grubby little non-
entity who had drifted into corruption, only just
realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly because every-
one else did it? Then there was the lukewarm Casserole

5*

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

of Adulterers. Could you find it in any trace of a fully
inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't.
They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had
blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in auto-
matic response to sexy advertisements, or to make them-
selves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure
themselves about their virility or their "normalcy," or
even because they had nothing else to do. Frankly, to
me who have tasted Messalina and Casanova, they
were nauseating. The Trade Unionist stuffed with
sedition was perhaps a shade better. He had done some
real harm. He had, not quite unknowingly, worked for
bloodshed, famine, and the extinction of liberty. Yes,
in a way. But what a way! He thought of those ultimate
objectives so little. Toeing the party line, self-impor-
tance, and above all mere routine, were what really
dominated his life,

But now comes the point. Gastronomically, all this is
deplorable. But I hope none of us puts gastronomy first.
Is it not, in another and far more serious way, full of
hope and promise?

Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may
be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more
abundance.

And then the triumph. We are tempted to say that
such souls or such residual puddles of what once was
soul are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy
(for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason)
thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did.
You youngsters who have not yet been on active serv-

53

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

ice have no idea with what labour, with what delicate
skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally cap-
tured.

The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbi-
ness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively
responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise
them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which
mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough;
but not that fatal millimetre of "too much." For then of
course all would possibly have been lost. They might
have seen; they might have repented. On the other
hand, if they had been raised too little, they would very
possibly have qualified for Limbo, as creatures suitable
neither for Heaven nor for Hell; things that, having
failed to make the grade, are allowed to sink into a more
or less contented sub-humanity forever.

In each individual choice of what the Enemy would
call the "wrong" turning such creatures are at first
hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility.
They do not understand either the source or the real
character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their
consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmos-
phere that surrounds them. And of course we have con-
trived that their very language should be all smudge
and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else's pro-
fession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their
Tempters was first, of course, to harden these choices of
the Hell-ward roads into a habit by steady repetition.
But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit
into a principle a principle the creature is prepared to

54

SGREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

defend. After that, all will go well. Conformity to the
social environment, at first merely instinctive or even
mechanical how should a jelly not conform? now be-
comes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Together-
ness or Being like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they
break now turns into a vague theory about it remem-
ber they know no history a theory expressed by call-
ing it conventional or puritan or bourgeois "morality."
Thus gradually there comes to exist at the centre of the
creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on
being what it is, and even to resist moods that might
tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflec-
tive (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emo-
tional and imaginative poverty excludes that) ; al-
most, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble,
or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here
at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articu-
late, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.

These, then, are two welcome phenomena. First, the
abundance of our captures; however tasteless our fare,
we are in no danger of famine. And secondly, the tri-
umph; the skill of our Tempters has never stood higher.
But the third moral, which I have not yet drawn, is the
most important of all.

The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have
well, I won't say feasted, but at any rate subsisted
tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to
increase. Our advices from Lower Command assure us
that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all our
tactics in view of this situation. The "great" sinners,

55

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

those in whom vivid and genial passions have been
pushed beyond the bounds and in whom an immense
concentration of will has been devoted to objects which
the Enemy abhors, will not disappear. But they will
grow rarer. Our catches will be ever more numerous;
but they will consist increasingly of trash trash which
we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hell-
hounds as unfit for diabolical consumption. And there
are two things I want you to understand about this.
First, that however depressing it may seem, it is really a
change for the better. And secondly, I would draw your
attention to the means by which It has been brought
about.

It is a change for the better. The great (and tooth-
some) sinners are made out of the very same material
as those horrible phenomena, the great Saints. The vir-
tual disappearance of such material may mean insipid
meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine
for the Enemy? He did not create the humans He did
not become one of them and die among them by torture
in order to produce candidates for Limbo; "failed"
humans. He wanted to make Saints; gods; things like
Himself. Is the dullness of your present fare not a very
small price to pay for the delicious knowledge that His
whole great experiment is petering out? But not only
that. As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority
lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more
effective agents for us. Every dictator or even dem-
agogue almost every film-star or crooner can now
draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him.

56

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in
him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have
no need to bother about individual temptation at all,
except for the few. Catch the bell-wether and his whole
flock comes after him.

But do you realize how we have succeeded in reduc-
ing so many of the human race to the level of ciphers?
This has not come about by accident. It has been our an-
swer and a magnificent answer it is to one of the most
serious challenges we ever had to face.

Let me recall to your minds what the human situation
was in the latter half of the nineteenth century the
period at which I ceased to be a practising Tempter
and was rewarded with an administrative post.
The great movement towards liberty and equality
among men had by then borne solid fruits and grown
mature. Slavery had been abolished. The American War
of Independence had been won. The French Revolu-
tion had succeeded. Religious toleration was almost
everywhere on the increase. In that movement there
had originally been many elements which were in our
favour. Much Atheism, much Anti-Clericalism, much
envy and thirst for revenge, even some (rather absurd)
attempts to revive Paganism, were mixed in it. It was
not easy to determine what our own attitude should be.
On the one hand it was a bitter blow to us it still is
that any sort of men who had been hungry should be
fed or any who had long worn chains should have them
struck off. But on the other hand, there was in the move-
ment so much rejection of faith, so much materialism,

57

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

secularism, and hatred, that we felt we were bound to
encourage it.

But by the latter part of the century the situation
was much simpler, and also much more ominous. In the
English sector (where I saw most of my front-line serv-
ice) a horrible thing had happened. The Enemy, with
His usual sleight of hand, had largely appropriated this
progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it
to His own ends. Very little of its old anti-Christianity
remained. The dangerous phenomenon called Christian
Socialism was rampant. Factory owners of the good old
type who grew rich on sweated labour, instead of being
assassinated by their workpeople we could have used
that were being frowned upon by their own class. The
rich were increasingly giving up their powers not in the
face of revolution and compulsion, but in obedience to
their own consciences. As for the poor who benefited
by this, they were behaving in a most disappointing
fashion. Instead of using their new liberties as we rea-
sonably hoped and expected for massacre, rape, and
looting, or even for perpetual intoxication, they were
perversely engaged in becoming cleaner, more or-
derly, more thrifty, better educated, and even more
virtuous. Believe me, gentledevils, the threat of some-
thing like a really healthy state of society seemed then
perfectly serious.

Thanks to our Father Below the threat was averted.
Our counter-attack was on two levels. On the deepest
level our leaders contrived to call into full life an ele-
ment which had been implicit in the movement from

58

SGREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving
for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal
freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed
it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the
state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the
individual is told that he has really willed (though he
didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to
do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indis-
pensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived
both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in Eng-
land we were pretty successful. I heard the other day
that in that country a man could not, without a permit,
cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into
planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a
tool-shed in his own garden. 4

Such was our counter-attack on one level. You, who
are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of
that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private
persons. Against them, or through them, our counter-at-
tack takes a different form.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead
them by the nose. The good work which our philologi-
cal experts have already done in the corruption of hu-
man language makes it unnecessary to warn you that
they should never be allowed to give this word a clear
and definable meaning. They won't. It will never oc-
cur to them that Democracy is properly the name of a
political system, even a system of voting, and that this
has only the most remote and tenuous connection with
what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they

59

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether
"democratic behaviour" means the behaviour that de-
mocracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a de-
mocracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to
them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; i
you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they
venerate. And of course it is connected with the politi-
cal ideal that men should be equally treated. You then
make a stealthy transition in their minds from this po-
litical ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Es-
pecially the man you are working on. As a result you can
use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the
most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all hu-
man feelings. You can get him to practise, not only
without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval,
conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would
be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a
man to say I'm as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus
induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good,
solid resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his state-
ment is false in fact, that he is no more equal to every-
one he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than
in height or waist-measurement. I mean that he does
not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as
you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St.
Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar
to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor

60

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality,
outside the strictly political field, is made only by those
who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it
expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing
awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to
accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents
every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes
its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere dif-
ference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be
different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recre-
ations, choice of food. "Here is someone who speaks
English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I
it must be a vile, upstage, lah-di-dah affectation. Here's
a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs thinks him-
self .too good for them no doubt. Here's a man who
hasn't turned on the jukebox he's one of those goddam
highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were hon-
est-to-God all right Joes they'd be like me. They've no
business to be different. It's undemocratic."

Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means
new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the
humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they al-
ways regarded it as the most odious, and also the most
comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt
it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in
others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is
that you can sanction it make it respectable and even
laudable by the incantatory use of the word demo-
cratic.

61

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

Under the influence of this incantation those who are
in any or every way inferior can labour more whole-
heartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down
everyone else to their own level. But that is not all.
Under the same influence, those who come, or could
come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back
from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly in-
formed that young humans now sometimes suppress an
incipient taste for classical music or good literature be-
cause it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that peo-
ple who would really wish to be and are offered the
Grace which would enable them to be honest, chaste,
or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them
Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take
them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration
with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) be-
come individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female
human is said to have uttered recently: "Oh God,
make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to
our labours, this will mean increasingly, "Make me a
minx, a moron, and a parasite."

Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few
(fewer every day) who will not be made Normal and
Regular and Like Folks and Integrated, increasingly
tend to become in reality the prigs and cranks which
the rabble would in any case have believed them to be.
For suspicion often creates what it suspects. ("Since,
whatever 1 do, the neighbours are going to think me a
witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged

62

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

for a sheep as a lamb and become one in reality/') As a
result we now have an intelligentsia which, though
very small, is very useful to the cause of HelL

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix
your attention on is the vast, over-all movement towards
the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every
kind of human excellence moral, cultural, social, or
intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how De-
mocracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us
the work that was once done by the most ancient Dicta-
torships, and by the same methods? You remember how
one of the Greek Dictators (they called them "tyrants"
then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his ad-
vice about the principles of government. The second
Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there
he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that
rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral
was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your sub-
jects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more
famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all
down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All
equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, "de-
mocracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work
without any other tyranny than her own. No one need
now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks
will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones.
The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their
desire to Be Like Stalks,

I have said that to secure the damnation of these little
souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be

63

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

individual, is a laborious and tricky work. But if proper
pains and skill are expended, you can be fairly confident
of the result. The great sinners seem easier to catch.
But then they are incalculable. After you have played
them for seventy years, the Enemy may snatch them
from your claws in the seventy-first. They are capable,
you see, of real repentance. They are conscious of real
guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready
to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy's
sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some
ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive
wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But
the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

My own experience, as I have said, was mainly on
the English sector, and I still get more news from it than
from any other. It may be that what I am now going to
say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some
of you may be operating. But you can make the neces-
sary adjustments when you get there. Some application
it will almost certainly have. If it has too little, you must
labour to make the country you are dealing with more
like what England already is.

In that promising land the spirit of Tm as good as you
has already become something more than a generally
social influence. It begins to work itself into their edu-
cational system. How far its operations there have gone
at the present moment, I would not like to say with
certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped
the tendency, you can easily predict its future develop-
ments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

the developing. The basic principle of the new educa-
tion is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to
feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That
would be "undemocratic/' These differences between
the pupils for they are obviously and nakedly individ-
ual differences must be disguised. This can be done
on various levels. At universities, examinations must
be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks.
Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or
nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they
have any power (or wish) to profit by higher educa-
tion or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid
or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elemen-
tary science can be set to doing the things that children
used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example,
make mud-pies and call it modelling. But all the time
there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to
the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they
are engaged in must have I believe the English already
use the phrase "parity of esteem/* An even more dras-
tic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to
proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back,
because the others would get a trauma Beelzebub,
what a useful word! by being left behind. The bright
pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own
age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who
would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits
listening to his coaeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT

ON A MA3X

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the vir-

65

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

tual abolition of education when Tm as good as you has
fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties
for not learning will vanish. The few who might want
to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop
their fellows? And anyway the teachers or should I
say, nurses? will be far too busy reassuring the dunces
and patting them on the back to waste any time on real
teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to
spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance
among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for
us.

Of course this would not follow unless all education
became state education. But it will. That is part of
the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that pur-
pose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who
were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in
order to have their children privately educated. The
removal of this class, besides linking up with the aboli-
tion of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of
the spirit that says I'm as good as you. This was, after all,
the social group which gave to the humans the over-
whelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philos-
ophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects,
jurists, and administrators. If ever there was a bunch
of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was
surely they. As an English politician remarked not long
ago, "A democracy does not want great men/'

It would be idle to ask of such a creature whether by
want it meant "need" or "like." But you had bet-

66

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

ter be clear. For here Aristotle's question comes up
again.

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of
Democracy in the strict sense of that word; the political
arrangement so called. Like all forms of government it
often works to our advantage; but on the whole less
often than other forms. And what we must realize is
that "democracy" in the diabolical sense (I'm as good as
you, Being like Folks, Togetherness) is the finest instru-
ment we could possibly have for extirpating political
Democracies from the face of the earth.

For "democracy*' or the "democratic spirit*' (diaboli-
cal sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation
mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which
flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or
whimper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what
Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when
such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children
have been made to work at school, where talent is
placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are
allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result
is possible.

The Democracies were surprised lately when they
found that Russia had got ahead of them in science.
What a delicious specimen of human blindness! If the
whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort
of excellence, why did they expect their scientists to
excel?

It is our function to encourage the behaviour,

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which de~
mocracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are
the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy de-
mocracy. You would almost wonder that even humans
don't see it themselves. Even if they don't read Aristotle
(that would be undemocratic) you would have thought
the French Revolution would have taught them that the
behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour
that preserves aristocracy. They might then have ap-
plied the same principle to all forms of government.

But I would not end on that note. I would not Hell
forbid! encourage in your own minds that delusion
which you must carefully foster in the minds of your
human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of na-
tions is in itself more important than that of individual
souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multipli-
cation of slave-states are for us a means (besides, of
course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction
of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or
damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us.
The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or
famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred,
rage, and despair which it may produce. I'm as good as
you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic
societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself,
as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humil-
ity, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of grati-
tude or admiration, turns a human being away from
almost every road which might finally lead him to
Heaven.

68

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

But now for the pleasantest part of my duty. It falls
to my lot to propose on behalf of the guests the health
of Principal Slubgob and the Tempters' Training Col-
lege. Fill your glasses. What is this I see? What is this
delicious bouquet I inhale? Can it be? Mr. Principal, I
unsay all my hard words about the dinner. I see, and
smell, that even under wartime conditions the College
cellar still has a few dozen of sound old vintage Pharisee.
Well, well, well. This is like old times. Hold it beneath
your nostrils for a moment, gentledevils. Hold it up to
the light. Look at those fiery streaks that writhe and
tangle in its dark heart, as if they were contending. And
so they are. You know how this wine is blended? Differ-
ent types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden, and
fermented together to produce its subtle flavour. Types
that were most antagonistic to one another on Earth.
Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were
all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional
abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both
had in common their self-righteousness and the almost
infinite distance between their actual outlook and any-
thing the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness
of other religions was the really live doctrine in the re-
ligion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its
litany. How they hated each other up there where the
sun shone! How much more they hate each other now
that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled.
Their astonishment, their resentment, at the combina-
tion, the festering of their eternally impenitent spite,
passing into our spiritual digestion, will work like fire.

69

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

Dark fire. All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill
day for us if what most humans mean by "religion"
ever vanishes from the Earth. It can still send us the
truly delicious sins. The fine flower of unholiness can
grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. No-
where do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps
of the altar.

Your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns,
Shadies, and Gentledevils: I give you the toast of Prin-
cipal Slubgob and the College!

70

FIVE
GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

G,

"OOD WORKS'* in the
plural is an egression much more familiar to modern
Christendom than "good work." Good works are chiefly
alms-giving or "helping" in the parish. They are quite
separate from one's "work." And good works need not
be good work, as anyone can see by inspecting some of
the objects made to be sold at bazaars for charitable
purposes. This is not according to our example. When
our Lord provided a poor wedding party with an extra
glass of wine all round, he was doing good works. But
also good work; it was a wine really worth drinking. Nor
is the neglect of goodness in our "work," our job, ac-
cording to precept. The apostle says every one must not
only work but work to produce what is "good."

The idea of Good Work is not quite extinct among
us, though it is not, I fear, especially characteristic of
religious people. I have found it among cabinet-makers,
cobblers, and sailors. It is no use at all trying to im-
press sailors with a new liner because she is the biggest
or costliest ship afloat. They look for what they call her
"lines": they predict how she will behave in a heavy

7*

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

sea. Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly.
They begin to prefer words like ' 'significant/' "impor-
tant/' "contemporary," or "daring." These are not, to
my mind, good symptoms.

But the great mass of men in all fully industrialized
societies are the victims of a situation which almost
excludes the idea of Good Work from the outset. "Built-
in obsolescence" becomes an economic necessity. Un-
less an article is so made that it will go to pieces in a year
or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a
sufficient turnover. A hundred years ago, when a man
got married, he had built for him (if he were rich
enough) a carriage in which he expected to drive for
the rest of his life. He now buys a car which he expects
to sell again in two years. Work nowadays must not be
good.

For the wearer, zip fasteners have this advantage
over buttons: that, while they last, they will save
him an infinitesimal amount of time and trouble. For
the producer, they have a much more solid merit; they
don't remain in working order long. Bad work is the
desideratum.

We must avoid taking a glibly moral view of this
situation. It is not solely the result of original or actual
sin. It has stolen upon us, unforeseen and unintended.
The degraded commercialism of our minds is quite as
much its result as its cause. Nor can it, in my opinion,
be cured by purely moral efforts.

Originally things are made for use, or delight, or
(more often) for both. The savage hunter makes him-

72

GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

self a weapon of flint or bone; makes it as well as he can,
for if it is blunt or brittle he will kill no meat.
His woman makes a clay pot to fetch water in; again as
well as she can, for she will have to use it. But they do
not for long (if at all) abstain from decorating these
things; they want to have (like Dogberry) "everything
handsome about them/' And while they work, we may
be sure they sing or whistle or at least hum. They may
tell stories too.

Into this situation, unobtrusive as Eden's snake and
at first as innocent as that snake once was, there must
sooner or later come a change. Each family no longer
makes all it needs. There is a specialist, a potter mak-
ing pots for the whole village; a smith making weap-
ons for all; a bard (poet and musician in one) singing
and story-telling for all. It is significant that in Homer
the smith of the gods is lame, and the poet among men is
blind. That may be how the thing began. The defec-
tives, who are no use as hunters or warriors, may be set
aside to provide both necessaries and recreation for
those who are.

The importance of this change is that we now have
people making things (pots, swords, lays) not for their
own use and delight but for the use and delight of
others. And of course they must, in some way or other,
be rewarded for doing it. The change is necessary un-
less society and arts are to remain in a state not of para-
disal, but of feeble, blundering, and impoverishing
simplicity. It is kept healthy by two facts. First, these
specialists will do their work as well as they can. They

73

THE WORJLD S LAST NIGHT

are right up against the people who are going to use it.
You'll have all the women in the village after you if you
make bad pots. You'll be shouted down if you sing a dull
lay. If you make bad swords, then at best the warriors
will come back and thrash you; at worst, they won't
come back at all, for the enemy will have killed them,
and your village will be burned and you yourself en-
slaved or knocked on the head. And secondly, because
the specialists are doing as well as they can something
that is indisputably worth doing, they will delight in
their work. We must not idealise. It will not all be de-
light. The smith may be overworked. The bard may be
frustrated when the village insists on hearing his last
lay over again (or a new one exactly like it) while he is
longing to get a hearing for some wonderful innovation.
But, by and large, the specialists have a life fit for a man;
usefulness, a reasonable amount of honour, and the joy
of exercising skill.

I lack space and, of course, knowledge, to trace the
whole process from this state of affairs to that in which
we are living to-day. But I think we can now disengage
the essence of the change. Granted the departure from
the primitive condition in which every one makes things
for himself, and granted, therefore, a condition in which
many work for others (who will pay them) , there are
still two sorts of job. Of one sort, a man can truly say, "I
am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be
worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no pri-
vate means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed,
I must be paid while I do it/' The other kind of job is

74

GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

that in which people do work whose sole purpose is the
earning of money; work which need not be, ought not
to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole
world unless it were paid.

We may thank God there are still plenty of jobs in
the first category. The agricultural labourer, the police-
man, the doctor, the artist, the teacher, the priest, and
many others, are doing what is worth doing in itself;
what quite a number of people would do, and do, with-
out pay; what every family would attempt to do for it-
self, in some amateurish fashion, if it lived in primitive
isolation. Of course jobs of this kind need not be agree-
able. Ministering to a leper settlement is one of them.

The opposite extreme may be represented by two
examples. I do not necessarily equate them morally,
but they are alike by our present classification. One is
the work of the professional prostitute. The peculiar
horror of her work if you say we should not call it
work, think again the thing that makes it so much
more horrible than ordinary fornication, is that it is an
extreme example of an activity which has no possible
end in view except money. You cannot go further in
that direction than sexual intercourse, not only with-
out marriage, not only without love, but even without
lust. My other example is this. 1 often see a hoarding
which bears a notice to the effect that thousands look at
this space and your firm ought to hire it for an advertise-
ment of its wares. Consider by how many stages this is
separated from "making that which is good/* A carpen-
ter has made this hoarding; that, in itself, has no use.

75

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

Printers and paper-makers have worked to produce
the notice worthless until someone hires the space
worthless to him until he pastes on it another notice,
still worthless to him unless it persuades someone else
to buy his goods; which themselves may well be ugly,
useless, and pernicious luxuries that no mortal would
have bought unless the advertisement, by its sexy or
snobbish incantations, had conjured up in him a facti-
tious desire for them. At every stage of the process, work
is being done whose sole value lies in the money
it brings.

Such would seem to be the inevitable result of a so-
ciety which depends predominantly on buying and
selling. In a rational world, things would be made be-
cause they were wanted; in the actual world, wants
have to be created in order that people may receive
money for making the things. That is why the distrust
or contempt of trade which we find in earlier societies
should not be too hastily set down as mere snobbery.
The more important trade is, the more people are con-
demned to and, worse still, learn to prefer what
we have called the second kind of job. Work worth do-
ing apart from its pay, enjoyable work, and good work
become the privilege of a fortunate minority. The com-
petitive search for customers dominates international
situations.

Within my lifetime in England money was (very
properly) collected to buy shirts for some men who
were out of work. The work they were out of was the
manufacture of shirts.

76

GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

That such a state of affairs cannot be permanent is
easily foreseen. But unfortunately it is most likely to
perish by its own internal contradictions in a manner
which will cause immense suffering. It can be ended
painlessly only if we find some way of ending it volun-
tarily; and needless to say I have no plan for doing that,
and none of our masters the Big Men behind govern-
ment and industry would take any notice if I had.
The only hopeful sign at the moment is the "space-race"
between America and Russia. Since we have got our-
selves into a state where the main problem is not to pro-
vide people with what they need or like, but to keep
people making things (it hardly matters what) , great
powers could not easily be better employed than in fab-
ricating costly objects which they then fling overboard.
It keeps money circulating and factories working, and
it won't do space much harm or not for a long time.
But the relief is partial and temporary. The main
practical task for most of us is not to give the Big Men
advice about how to end our fatal economy we have
none to give and they wouldn't listen but to consider
how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as
possible.

It is something even to recognize that it is fatal and
insane. Just as the Christian has a great advantage over
other men, not by being less fallen than they nor less
doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that
he is a fallen man in a fallen world; so we shall do bet-
ter if we remember at every moment what Good Work
was and how impossible it has now become for the ma-

77

THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

jority. We may have to earn our living by taking part in
the production of objects which are rotten in quality and
which, even if they were good in quality, would not be
worth producing the demand or "market" for them
having been simply engineered by advertisement. Be-
side the waters of Babylon or the assembly belt
we shall still say inwardly, "It I forget thee, O Jerusa-
lem, may my right hand forget its cunning/' (It will.)

And of course we shall keep our eyes skinned for any
chance of escape. If we have any "choice of a career"
(but has one man in a thousand any such thing?) we
shall be after the sane jobs like greyhounds and stick
there like limpets. We shall try, if we get the chance, to
earn our living by doing well what would be worth do-
ing even if we had not our living to earn. A consider-
able mortification of our avarice may be necessary. It is
usually the insane jobs that lead to big money; they are
often also the least laborious.

But beyond all this there is something subtler. We
must take great care to preserve our habits of mind from
infection by those which the situation has bred. Such an
infection has, in my opinion, deeply corrupted our
artists.

Until quite recently until the latter part of the last
century it was taken for granted that the business of
the artist was to delight and instruct his public. There
were, of course, different publics; the street-songs and
the oratorios were not addressed to the same audience
(though I think a good many people liked both). And

GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

an artist might lead his public on to appreciate finer
things than they had wanted at first; but he could do
this only by being, from the first, if not merely enter-
taining, yet entertaining, and if not completely intelli-
gible, yet very largely intelligible. All this has changed.
In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing
about the artist's duty to us. It is all about our duty to
him. He owes us nothing; we owe him "recognition/*
even though he has never paid the slightest attention to
our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don't give it to him,
our name is mud. In this shop, the customer is always
wrong.

But this change is surely part of our changed attitude
to all work. As "giving employment" becomes more
important than making things men need or like, there
is a tendency to regard every trade as something that
exists chiefly for the sake of those who practise it. The
smith does not work in order that the warriors may
fight; the warriors exist and fight in order that the smith
may be kept busy. The bard does not exist in order to
delight the tribe; the tribe exists in order to appreciate
the bard.

In industry highly creditable motives, as well as in-
sanity, lie behind this change of attitude. A real ad-
vance in charity stopped us talking about "surplus popu-
lation' ' and started us talking instead about "unemploy-
ment." The danger is that this should lead us to forget
that employment is not an end in itself. We want people
to be employed only as a means to their being fed be-

79

THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

lieving (whether rightly, who knows?) that it is better
to feed them even for making bad things badly than for
doing nothing.

But though we have a duty to feed the hungry,
I doubt whether we have a duty to "appreciate" the
ambitious. This attitude to art is fatal to good work.
Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we
are brow-beaten into "appreciating," are not good work
because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles
of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is
in the strict sense working, he of course takes into ac-
count the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his
audience. These, no less than the language, the marble,
or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used,
tamed, sublimated, not ignored nor defied. Haughty
indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is
laziness and incompetence. You have not learned your
job. Hence, real honest-to-God work, so far as the arts
are concerned, now appears chiefly in low-brow art; in
the film, the detective story, the children's story. These
are often sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately
dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour
successfully used to do what is intended. Do not mis-
understand. The high-brow productions may, of coutse,
reveal a finer sensibility and profounder thought. But
a puddle is not a work, whatever rich wines or oils or
medicines have gone into it.

"Great works" (of art) and "good works" (of charity)
had better also be Good Work. Let choirs sing well or
not at all. Otherwise we merely confirm the majority

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GOOD WORK AND GOOD WORKS

in their conviction that the world of Business, which
does with such efficiency so much that never really
needed doing, is the real, the adult, and the practical
world; and that all this "culture" and all this "religion"
(horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateur-
ish, and rather effeminate activities.

81

SIX RELIGION AND ROCKETRY

AN my time I have heard

two quite different arguments against my religion put
forward in the name of science. When I was a young-
ster, people used to say that the universe was not only
not friendly to life but positively hostile to it. Life had
appeared on this planet by a millionth chance, as if at
one point there had been a breakdown of the elabo-
rate defenses generally enforced against it. We should
be rash to assume that such a leak had occurred more
than once. Probably life was a purely terrestrial ab-
normality. We were alone in an infinite desert. Which
just showed the absurdity of the Christian idea that
there was a Creator who was interested in living crea-
tures.

But then came Professor F. B. Hoyle, the Cambridge
cosmologist, and in a fortnight or so everyone I met
seemed to have decided that the universe was probably
quite well provided with inhabitable globes and with
livestock to inhabit them. Which just showed (equally
well) the absurdity of Christianity with its parochial
idea that Man could be important to God.

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THE WORLD S LAST NIGHT

This Is a warning of what we may expect if we ever
do discover animal life (vegetable does not matter) on
another planet. Each new discovery, even every new
theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching
theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized
by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Chris-
tianity; it is often, and more embarrassingly, seized by
injudicious believers as the basis for a new defence.

But usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided
and the novelty has been chewed over by real theolo-
gians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides
find themselves pretty much where they were before.
So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism,
with Biblical Criticism, with the new psychology. So, I
cannot help expecting, it will be with the discovery of
"life on other planets" If that discovery is ever made.

The supposed threat is clearly directed against the
doctrine of the Incarnation, the belief that God of God
"for us men and for our salvation came down from
heaven and was . . . made man." Why for us men
more than for others? If we find ourselves to be but one
among a million races, scattered through a million
spheres, how can we, without absurd arrogance, believe
ourselves to have been uniquely favored? I admit that
the question could become formidable. In fact, it will
become formidable when, if ever, we know the answer
to five other questions.

i. Are there animals anywhere except on earth? We
do not know. We do not know whether we ever shall
know.

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RELIGION AND ROCKETRY

2. Supposing there were, have any of these animals
what we call "rational souls'? By this I include not
merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the ap-
prehension of values, the power to mean by "good"
something more than "good for me" or even "good for
my species/' If instead of asking, "Have they rational
souls?" you prefer to ask, "Are they spiritual animals?"
I think we shall both mean pretty much the same. If the
answer to either question should be No, then of course
it would not be at all strange that our species should be
treated differently from theirs.

There would be no sense in offering to a creature,
however clever or amiable, a gift which that creature
was by its nature incapable either of desiring or of re-
ceiving. We teach our sons to read but not our dogs. The
dogs prefer bones. And of course, since we do not yet
know whether there are extra-terrestrial animals at all,
we are a long way from knowing that they are rational
(or "spiritual") .

Even if we met them we might not find it so easy to
decide. It seems to me possible to suppose creatures so
clever that they could talk, though they were, from the
theological point of view, really only animals, capable
of pursuing or enjoying only natural ends. One meets
humans the machine-minded and materialistic urban
type who look as if they were just that. As Christians
we must believe the appearance to be false; somewhere
under that glib surface there lurks, however atrophied,
a human soul. But in other worlds there might be things
that really are what these seem to be. Conversely, there

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might be creatures genuinely spiritual, whose powers of
manufacture and abstract thought were so humble that
we should mistake them for mere animals. God shield
them from us!

3. If there are species, and rational species, other
than man, are any or all of them, like us, fallen? This is
the point non-Christians always seem to forget. They
seem to think that the Incarnation implies some partic-
ular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it
implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and de-
pravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would
need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not
the physician. Christ died for men precisely because
men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
Notice what waves of utterly unwarranted hypothesis
these critics of Christianity want us to swim through. We
are now supposing the fall of hypothetically rational
creatures whose mere existence is hypothetical!

4. If all of them (and surely all is a long shot) or any
of them have fallen have they been denied Redemption
by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ? For of course
it is no very new idea that the eternal Son may, for all
we know, have been incarnate in other worlds than
earth and so saved other races than ours. As Alice Mey-
nell wrote in "Christ in the Universe":

. . . in the eternities

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

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RELIGION AND ROCKETRY

I wouldn't go as far as "doubtless" myself. Perhaps of
all races we only fell. Perhaps Man is the only
lost sheep; the one, therefore, whom the Shepherd came
to seek. Or perhaps but this brings us to the next wave
of assumption. It is the biggest yet and will knock
us head over heels, but I am fond of a tumble in the surf.

5. If we knew (which we don't) the answers to i, 2,
and 3 and, further, if we knew that Redemption by an
Incarnation and Passion had been denied to creatures
in need of it is it certain that this is the only mode of
Redemption that is possible? Here of course we ask for
what is not merely unknown but, unless God should re-
veal it, wholly unknowable. It may be that the further
we were permitted to see into His councils, the more
clearly we should understand that thus and not other-
wise by the birth at Bethlehem, the cross on Calvary
and the empty tomb a fallen race could be rescued.
There may be a necessity for this, insurmountable,
rooted in the very nature of God and the very nature of
sin. But we don't know. At any rate, I don't know.
Spiritual as well as physical conditions might differ
widely in different worlds. There might be different
sorts and different degrees of fallenness. We must surely
believe that the divine charity is as fertile in resource as
it is measureless in condescension. To different dis-
eases, or even to different patients sick with the same
disease, the great Physician may have applied different
remedies; remedies which we should probably not rec-
ognize as such even if we ever heard of them.

It might turn out that the redemption of other species

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differed -from ours by working through ours. There is a
hint o something like this in St. Paul (Romans 8:19-
23) when he says that the whole creation is longing and
waiting to be delivered from some kind of slavery, and
that the deliverance will occur only when we, we Chris-
tians, fully enter upon our sonship to God and exercise
our "glorious liberty."

On the conscious level I believe that he was thinking
only of our own Earth: of animal, and probably vege-
table, life on Earth being "renewed" or glorified at the
glorification of man in Christ. But it is perhaps possible
it is not necessary to give his words a cosmic mean-
ing. It may be that Redemption, starting with us, is to
work from us and through us.

This would no doubt give man a pivotal position. But
such a position need not imply any superiority in us or
any favouritism in God. The general, deciding where to
begin his attack, does not select the prettiest landscape
or the most fertile field or the most attractive village.
Christ was not born in a stable because a stable is, in it-
self, the most convenient or distinguished place for a
maternity.

Only if we had some such function would a contact
between us and such unknown races be other than a ca-
lamity. If indeed we were unfallen, it would be an-
other matter.

It sets one dreaming to interchange thoughts with
beings whose thinking had an organic background
wholly different from ours (other senses, other appe-
tites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly

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superior to our own yet able for that very reason to de-
scend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we
met innocent and childlike creatures who could never
be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the in-
habitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich
affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious
dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are
fallen.

We know what our race does to strangers. Man de-
stroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man
murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man.
Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and
slag-heaps. There are individuals who don't. But they
are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers
in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the
needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical
expert. They will do as their kind has always done.
What that will be if they meet things weaker than them-
selves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they
meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, des-
troyed.

It is interesting to wonder how things would go i
they met an unfallen race. At first, to be sure, they'd
have a grand time jeering at, duping, and exploiting its
innocence; but I doubt if our half-animal cunning
would long be a match for godlike wisdom, selfless valour,
and perfect unanimity.

I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical,
problems which will arise if ever we meet rational crea-
tures which are not human. Against them we shall, i

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we can, commit all the crimes we have already commit-
ted against creatures certainly human but differing
from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry
heavens will become an object to which good men can
look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized
pity, and burning shame.

Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we
shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall
perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries
be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly com-
bined in the past. The missionary's holy desire to save
souls has not always been kept quite distinct from
the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as he calls
it) "civilize" the (as he calls them) "natives." Would
all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they
met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon
creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Sal-
vation which God has appointed for Man? Would they
denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which
the spiritual and biological history of these strange
creatures fully justified and which God Himself had
blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they
had better learn? I do not know.

What I do know is that here and now, as our only pos-
sible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I
should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and
all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall
be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated
of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we
must not give back one single inch. We shall probably

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fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Oui
loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who
are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even
if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological,
kinship that counts.

But let us thank God that we are still very far from
travel to other worlds.

I have wondered before now whether the vast
astronomical distances may not be God's quarantine
precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a
fallen species from spreading. And of course we are also
very far from the supposed theological problem which
contact with other rational species might raise. Such
species may not exist. There is not at present a shred of
empirical evidence that they do. There is nothing but
what the logicians would call arguments from "a priori
probability" arguments that begin "It is only nat-
ural to suppose/' or "All analogy suggests/' or "Is it not
the height of arrogance to rule out ?" They make very
good reading. But who except a born gambler ever risks
five dollars on such grounds in ordinary life?

And, as we have seen, the mere existence of these
creatures would not raise a problem. After that, we still
need to know that they are fallen; then, that they have
not been, or will not be, redeemed in the mode we
know; and then, that no other mode is possible. I think
a Christian is sitting pretty if his faith never encount-
ers more formidable difficulties than these conjectural
phantoms.

If I remember rightly, St. Augustine raised a ques-

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tlon about the theological position of satyrs, monopods,
and other semi-human creatures. He decided it could
wait till we knew there were any. So can this.

"But supposing/' you say. "Supposing all these em-
barrassing suppositions turned out to be true?" I can
only record a conviction that they won't; a conviction
which has for me become in the course of years irresist-
ible. Christians and their opponents again and again ex-
pect that some new discovery will either turn matters of
faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to
patent absurdities. But it has never happened.

What we believe always remains intellectually possi-
ble; it never becomes intellectually compulsive. I have
an Idea that when this ceases to be so, the world will be
ending. We have been warned that all but conclusive
evidence against Christianity, evidence that would de-
ceive (If it were possible) the very elect, will appear
with Antichrist.

And after that there will be wholly conclusive
evidence on the other side.

But not, I fancy, till then on either side.

SEVEN - THE WORLD'S LAST NIGHT

T

JLH;

.HERE are many rea-
sons why the modern Christian and even the modern
theologian may hesitate to give to the doctrine of
Christ's Second Coming that emphasis which was
usually laid on it by our ancestors. Yet it seems to me
impossible to retain in any recognisable form our belief
in the Divinity of Christ and the truth of the Christian
revelation while abandoning, or even persistently neg-
lecting, the promised, and threatened, Return. "He
shall come again to judge the quick and the dead/' says
the Apostles' Creed. "This same Jesus/' said the angels
in Acts, "shall so come in like manner as ye have seen
him go into heaven." "Hereafter/' said our Lord him-
self (by those words inviting crucifixion) , "shall ye
see the Son of Man . . . coming in the clouds of
heaven." If this is not an integral part of the faith once
given to the saints, I do not know what is. In the follow-
ing pages I shall endeavour to deal with some of the
thoughts that may deter modern men from a firm belief
in, or a due attention to, the return or Second Coming
of the Saviour. I have no claim to speak as an expert in

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any of the studies involved, and merely put forward the
reflections which have arisen in my own mind and have
seemed to me (perhaps wrongly) to be helpful. They
are all submitted to the correction of wiser heads.

The grounds for modern embarrassment about this
doctrine fall into two groups, which may be called the
theoretical and the practical. 1 will deal with the theo-
retical first.

Many are shy of this doctrine because they are react-
ing (in my opinion very properly reacting) against a
school of thought which is associated with the great
name of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. According to that school,
Christ's teaching about his own return and the end of
the world what theologians call his ' "apocalyptic"
was the very essence of his message. All his other doc-
trines radiated from it; his moral teaching everywhere
presupposed a speedy end of the world. If pressed to
an extreme, this view, as I think Chesterton said,
amounts to seeing in Christ little more than an earlier
William Miller, who created a local "scare." I am not
saying that Dr. Schweitzer pressed it to that conclusion:
but it has seemed to some that his thought invites us in
that direction. Hence, from fear of that extreme, arises
a tendency to soft-pedal what Schweitzer's school has
overemphasized.

For my own part I hate and distrust reactions not only
in religion but in everything. Luther surely spoke very
good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard
who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it
next time on the left. I am convinced that those who

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find in Christ's apocalyptic the whole of his message are
mistaken. But a thing does not vanish it is not even
discredited because someone has spoken of it with
exaggeration. It remains exactly where it was. The only
difference is that if it has recently been exaggerated,
we must now take special care not to overlook it; for
that is the side on which the drunk man is now
most likely to fall off.

The very name "apocalyptic 7 ' assigns our Lord's
predictions of the Second Coming to a class. There are
other specimens of it: the Apocalypse of Baruch, the
Book of Enoch, or the Ascension of Isaiah. Christians
are far from regarding such texts as Holy Scripture,
and to most modern tastes the genre appears tedious and
unedifying. Hence there arises a feeling that our Lord's
predictions, being "much the same sort of thing/' are
discredited. The charge against them might be put
either in a harsher or a gentler form. The harsher form
would run, in the mouth of an atheist, something like
this: "You see that, after all, your vaunted Jesus was
really the same sort of crank or charlatan as all the other
writers of apocalyptic." The gentler form, used more
probably by a modernist, would be like this: "Every
great man is partly of his own age and partly for all
time. What matters in his work is always that which
transcends his age, not that which he shared with a thou-
sand forgotten contemporaries. We value Shakespeare
for the glory of his language and his knowledge of the
human heart, which were his own; not for his belief in
witches or the divine right of kings, or his failure to

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take a daily bath. So with Jesus. His belief in a speedy
and catastrophic end to history belongs to him not as a
great teacher but as a first-century Palestinian peasant.
It was one of his inevitable limitations, best forgotten.
We must concentrate on what distinguished him from
other first-century Palestinian peasants, on his moral
and social teaching/'

As an argument against the reality of the Second
Coming this seems to me to beg the question at issue.
When we propose to ignore in a great man's teaching
those doctrines which it has in common with the
thought of his age, we seem to be assuming that the
thought of his age was erroneous. When we select for
serious consideration those doctrines which "transcend"
the thought of his own age and are "for all time/' we
are assuming that the thought of our age is correct: for
of course by thoughts which transcend the great man's
age we really mean thoughts that agree with ours. Thus
I value Shakespeare's picture of the transformation in
old Lear more than I value his views about the divine
right of kings, because I agree with Shakespeare that a
man can be purified by suffering like Lear, but do not
believe that kings (or any other rulers) have divine
right in the sense required. When the great man's views
do not seem to us erroneous we do not value them the
less for having been shared with his contemporaries.
Shakespeare's disdain for treachery and Christ's blessing
on the poor were not alien to the outlook of their re-
spective periods; but no one wishes to discredit them on
that account. No one would reject Christ's apocalyptic

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on the ground that apocalyptic was common In first-
century Palestine unless he had already decided that the
thought o first-century Palestine was in that respect
mistaken. But to have so decided is surely to have
begged the question; for the question is whether the
expectation of a catastrophic and Divinely ordered end
of the present universe is true or false.

If we have an open mind on that point, the whole
problem is altered. If such an end is really going to oc-
cur, and if (as is the case) the Jews had been trained by
their religion to expect it, then it is very natural that
they should produce apocalyptic literature. On that
view, our Lord's production of something like the other
apocalyptic documents would not necessarily result
from his supposed bondage to the errors of his period,
but would be the Divine exploitation of a sound ele-
ment in contemporary Judaism: nay, the time and place
in which it pleased him to be incarnate would, pre-
sumably, have been chosen because, there and then,
that element existed, and had, by his eternal providence,
been developed for that very purpose. For if we once
accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, we must surely
be very cautious in suggesting that any circumstance
in the culture of first-century Palestine was a hamper-
ing or distorting influence upon his teaching. Do we
suppose that the scene of God's earthly life was selected
at random? that some other scene would have served
better?

But there is worse to come. "Say what you like/* we
shall be told, "the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Chris-

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tians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the
New Testament that they all expected the Second
Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they
had a reason, and one which you will find very embar-
rassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and
indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many
words, 'this generation shall not pass till all these things
be done/ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more
about the end of the world than anyone else."

It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bi-
ble. Yet how teasing, also, that within fourteen words of
it should come the statement "But of that day and that
hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are In
heaven, neither the Son, but the Father/' The one ex-
hibition of error and the one confession of ignorance
grow side by side. That they stood thus in the mouth of
Jesus himself, and were not merely placed thus by the
reporter, we surely need not doubt. Unless the reporter
were perfectly honest he would never have recorded
the confession of ignorance at all; he could have had no
motive for doing so except a desire to tell the whole
truth. And unless later copyists were equally honest
they would never have preserved the (apparently) mis-
taken prediction about "this generation** after the pas-
sage of time had shown the (apparent) mistake. This
passage (Mark 13:30-32) and the cry "Why hast thou
forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) together make up the
strongest proof that the New Testament is historically
reliable. The evangelists have the first great characteris-

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tic of honest witnesses: they mention facts which are,
at first sight, damaging to their main contention.

The facts, then, are these: that Jesus professed him-
self (in some sense) ignorant, and within a moment
showed that he really was so. To believe in the Incarna-
tion, to believe that he is God, makes it hard to under-
stand how he could be ignorant; but also makes it cer-
tain that, if he said he could be ignorant, then ignorant
he could really be. For a God who can be ignorant is
less baffling than a God who falsely professes ignorance.
The answer of theologians is that the God-Man was
omniscient as God, and ignorant as Man. This, no
doubt, is true, though it cannot be imagined. Nor in-
deed can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be im-
agined, nor the twilight of reason in his infancy; still
less his merely organic life in his mother's womb. But
the physical sciences, no less than theology, propose for
our belief much that cannot be imagined.

A generation which has accepted the curvature of
space need not boggle at the Impossibility of imagin-
ing the consciousness of incarnate God. In that con-
sciousness the temporal and the timeless were united.
I think we can acquiesce in mystery at that point, pro-
vided we do not aggravate it by our tendency to picture
the timeless life of God as, simply, another sort of
time. We are committing that blunder whenever we
ask how Christ could be at the same moment ignorant
and omniscient, or how he could be the God who nei-
ther slumbers nor sleeps while he slept. The italicized

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words conceal an attempt to establish a temporal rela-
tion between his timeless life as God and the days,
months, and years o his life as Man. And of course
there is no such relation. The Incarnation is not an epi-
sode in the life of God: the Lamb is slain and there-
fore presumably born, grown to maturity, and risen
from all eternity. The taking up into God's nature of
humanity, with all its ignorances and limitations, is
not itself a temporal event, though the humanity which
is so taken up was, like our own, a thing living and dy-
ing in time. And if limitation, and therefore ignorance,
was thus taken up, we ought to expect that the ignorance
should at some time be actually displayed. It would be
difficult, and, to me, repellent, to suppose that Jesus
never asked a genuine question, that is, a question to
which he did not know the answer. That would make of
his humanity something so unlike ours as scarcely to de-
serve the name. I find it easier to believe that when he
said "Who touched me?" (Luke 7:45) he really wanted
to know.

The difficulties which I have so far discussed are, to a
certain extent, debating points. They tend rather to
strengthen a disbelief already based on other grounds
than to create disbelief by their own force. We are now
coming to something much more important and often
less fully conscious. The doctrine of the Second Com-
ing is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or
developmental character of modern thought. We have
been taught to think of the world as something that
grows slowly towards perfection, something that "pro-

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gresses" or "evolves/ 7 Christian Apocalyptic offers us no
such hope. It does not even foretell (which would be
more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual de-
cay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from
without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a
brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on
the play "Halt!"

To this deep-seated objection I can only reply that,
in my opinion, the modern conception of Progress or
Evolution (as popularly imagined) is simply a myth,
supported by no evidence whatever.

I say "evolution, as popularly imagined." I am not
in the least concerned to refute Darwinism as a theorem
in biology. There may be flaws in that theorem, but I
have here nothing to do with them. There may be signs
that biologists are already contemplating a withdrawal
from the whole Darwinian position, but I claim to be no
judge of such signs. It can even be argued that what Dar-
win really accounted for was not the origin, but the
elimination, of species, but I will not pursue that argu-
ment. For purposes of this article I am assuming that
Darwinian biology is correct. What I want to point out
is the illegitimate transition from the Darwinian theo-
rem in biology to the modern myth of evolutionism or
developmentalism or progress in general.

The first thing to notice is that the myth arose earlier
than the theorem, in advance of all evidence. Two great
works of art embody the idea of a universe in which, by
some inherent necessity, the "higher" always supersedes
the "lower/* One is Keats's Hyperion and the other is

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Wagner's Nibelung's Ring. And they are both earlier
than the Origin of Species. You could not have a clearer
expression of the developmental or progressive idea
than Oceanus' words

'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.

And you could not have a more ardent submission to it
than those words in which Wagner describes his
tetralogy.

The progress of the whole poem., therefore [he writes
to Rocket in 1854], shows the necessity of recognising,
and submitting to, the change^ the diversity, the multi-
plicity, and the eternal novelty., of the Real. Wotan rises
to the tragic heights of willing his own downfall. This
is all that we have to learn from the history of Man
to will the Necessary, and ourselves to bring it to pass.
The creative work which this highest and self-renounc-
ing will finally accomplishes is the fearless and ever-
loving man, Siegfried.*

* "Der Fortgang des ganzen Gedichtes zeigt demnach die Notwen-
digkeit, den Wechsel, die Mannigfaltigkeit, die Vielheit, die ewige
Neuheit der Wirklichkeit und des Lebens anzuerkennen und ihr zu
weichen. Wotan schwingt sick bis zu der tragischen Hohe, seinen
Untergang zu wollen. Dies ist alles, was wir aus der Geschichte der
Menscheit zu lernen haben: das Notwendige zu wollen und selbst zu
vollbringen. Das Schopfungswerk dieses hochsten, selbst vernichtenden
Willens ist der endlich gewonnene furchtlo$e f stets liebende Mensch;
Siegfried."

Fuller research into the origins of this potent myth would lead us
to the German idealists and thence (as I have heard suggested) through
Boehme back to Alchemy. Is the whole dialectical view of history pos-
sibly a gigantic projection of the old dream that we can make gold?

1O2

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The Idea that the myth (so potent in all modem
thought) is a result of Darwin's biology would thus
seem to be unhistorical. On the contrary, the attraction
o Darwinism was that it gave to a pre-existing myth the
scientific reassurances it required. If no evidence for
evolution had been forthcoming, it would have been
necessary to invent it. The real sources of the myth are
partly political. It projects onto the cosmic screen
feelings engendered by the Revolutionary period.

In the second place, we must notice that Darwinism
gives no support to the belief that natural selection,
working upon chance variations, has a general tendency
to produce improvement. The illusion that it has comes
from confining our attention to a few species which
have (by some possibly arbitrary standard of our own)
changed for the better. Thus the horse has improved in
the sense that protohippos would be less useful to us
than his modern descendant. The anthropoid has im-
proved in the sense that he now is Ourselves. But a great
many of the changes produced by evolution are not im-
provements by any conceivable standard. In battle men
save their lives sometimes by advancing and sometimes
by retreating. So, in the battle for survival, species save
themselves sometimes by increasing, sometimes by
jettisoning, their powers. There is no general law of
progress in biological history.

And, thirdly, even if there were, it would not follow
it is, indeed, manifestly not the case that there is
any law of progress in ethical, cultural, and social his-
tory. No one looking at world history without some pre-

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conception In favor of progress could find in it a steady
up gradient. There is often progress within a given field
over a limited period. A school of pottery or painting, a
moral effort in a particular direction, a practical art like
sanitation or shipbuilding, may continuously improve
over a number of years. If this process could spread to
all departments of life and continue indefinitely, there
would be "Progress" of the sort our fathers believed in.
But it never seems to do so. Either it is interrupted (by
barbarian irruption or the even less resistible infiltra-
tion of modern industrialism) or else, more myste-
riously, it decays. The idea which here shuts out the
Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world
slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generali-
zation from experience. And it is a myth which dis-
tracts us from our real duties and our real interest. It is
our attempt to guess the plot of a drama in which we
are the characters. But how can the characters in a play
guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not
the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on
the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on"
concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes
that follow it.

In King Lear (Illrvii) there is a man who is such a
minor character that Shakespeare has not given him
even a name: he is merely "First Servant/' All the char-
acters around him Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund
have fine long-term plans. They think they know how
the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The
servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how

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the play is going to go. But he understands the present
scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old
Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword
is out and pointed at his master's breast in a moment:
then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his
whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life
and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have
acted.

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that
we do not and cannot know when the world drama will
end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment:
say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So
many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were
going to get married next month, perhaps you were go-
ing to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of
a great scientific discovery; you may be maturing great
social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise
God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this
short? Not now> of all moments!

But we think thus because we keep on assuming that
we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not
even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do
not know who are the major and who the minor char-
acters. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an
audience (if angels and archangels and all the company
of heaven fill the pit and the stalls) may have an ink-
ling. But we, never seeing the play from outside, never
meeting any characters except the tiny minority who
are "on" in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly igno-

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rant of the future and very imperfectly informed about
the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to
come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure;
but we waste our time in guessing when that will be.
That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot
see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to
expect that the Author will have something to say to
each of us on the part that each of us has played. The
playing it well is what matters infinitely.

The doctrine of the Second Coming, then, is not to
be rejected because it conflicts with our favorite mod-
ern mythology. It is, for that very reason, to be the more
valued and made more frequently the subject of medi-
tation. It is the medicine our condition especially needs.

And with that, I turn to the practical. There is a real
difficulty in giving this doctrine the place which it ought
to have in our Christian life without, at the same time,
running a certain risk. The fear of that risk probably
deters many teachers who accept the doctrine from say-
ing very much about it.

We must admit at once that this doctrine has, in the
past, led Christians into very great follies. Apparently
many people find it difficult to believe in this great
event without trying to guess its date, or even without
accepting as a certainty the date that any quack or hys-
teric offers them. To write a history of all these ex-
ploded predictions would need a book, and a sad, sordid,
tragi-comical book it would be. One such prediction was
circulating when St. Paul wrote his second letter to the
Thessalonians. Someone had told them that "the Day"

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was "at hand." This was apparently having the result
which such predictions usually have: people were idling
and playing the busybody. One of the most famous pre-
dictions was that of poor William Miller in 1843. Miller
(whom I take to have been an honest fanatic) dated the
Second Coming to the year, the day, and the very min-
ute. A timely comet fostered the delusion. Thousands
waited for the Lord at midnight on March 2ist, and
went home to a late breakfast on the 22nd followed by
the jeers of a drunkard.

Clearly, no one wishes to say anything that will
reawaken such mass hysteria. We must never speak to
simple, excitable people about "the Day" without em-
phasizing again and again the utter impossibility of pre-
diction. We must try to show them that that impossibil-
ity is an essential part of the doctrine. If you do not be-
lieve our Lord's words, why do you believe in his return
at all? And if you do believe them must you not put
away from you, utterly and forever, any hope of dating
that return? His teaching on the subject quite clearly
consisted of three propositions, (i) That he will cer- x
tainly return. (2) That we cannot possibly find out
when. (3) And that therefore we must ahvays be ready
for him.

Note the therefore. Precisely because we cannot pre-
dict the moment, we must be ready at all moments. Our
Lord repeated this practical conclusion again and again;
as if the promise of the Return had been made for the
sake of this conclusion alone. Watch, watch, is the bur-
den of his advice. I shall come like a thief. You will not,

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I most solemnly assure you you will not, see me ap-
proaching. If the householder had known at what time
the burglar would arrive, he would have been ready for
him. If the servant had known when his absent em-
ployer would come home, he would not have been
found drunk in the kitchen. But they didn't Nor will
you. Therefore you must be ready at all times. The
point is surely simple enough. The schoolboy does not
know which part of his Virgil lesson he will be made to
translate: that is why he must be prepared to translate
any passage. The sentry does not know at what time an
enemy will attack, or an officer inspect, his post: that is
why he must keep awake all the time. The Return is
wholly unpredictable. There will be wars and rumours
of wars and all kinds of catastrophes, as there always are.
Things will be, in that sense, normal, the hour before
the heavens roll up like a scroll. You cannot guess it. If
you could, one chief purpose for which it was foretold
would be frustrated. And God's purposes are not so
easily frustrated as that. One's ears should be closed
against any future William Miller in advance. The
folly of listening to him at all is almost equal to the folly
of believing him. He couldn't know what he pretends,
or thinks, he knows.

Of this folly George MacDonald has written well
"Do those/' he asks, "who say, Lo here or lo there are
the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him
and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch lest
he find them neglecting their work, they stare this way

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and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming
like a thief! Obedience is the one key of life/'

The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far
as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that
at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's ques-
tion "What if this present were the world's last night?"
is equally relevant.

Sometimes this question has been pressed upon our
minds with the purpose of exciting fear. I do not think
that is its right use. I am, indeed, far from agreeing with
those who think all religious fear barbarous and degrad-
ing and demand that it should be banished from the
spiritual life. Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear.
But so do several other things ignorance, alcohol, pas-
sion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable
that we should all advance to that perfection of love in
which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable,
until we have reached that stage, that we should allow
any inferior agent to cast out our fear. The objection
to any attempt at perpetual trepidation about the Sec-
ond Coming is, in my view, quite a different one:
namely, that it will certainly not succeed. Fear is
an emotion: and it is quite impossible even physically
impossible to maintain any emotion for very long. A
perpetual excitement of hope about the Second Com-
ing is impossible for the same reason. Crisis-feeling of
any sort is essentially transitory. Feelings come and go,
and when they come a good use can be made of them:
they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.

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What is important is not that we should always fear
(or hope) about the End but that we should always re-
member, always take it into account. An analogy may
here help. A man of seventy need not be always feeling
(much less talking) about his approaching death: but
a wise man of seventy should always take it into account.
He would be foolish to embark on schemes which pre-
suppose twenty more years of life: he would be crimi-
nally foolish not to make indeed, not to have made
long since his will. Now, what death is to each man,
the Second Coming is to the whole human race. We all
believe, I suppose, that a man should "sit loose" to his
own individual life, should remember how short, pre-
carious, temporary, and provisional a thing it is; should
never give all his heart to anything which will end when
his life ends. What modern Christians find it harder to
remember is that the whole life of humanity in this
world is also precarious, temporary, provisional.

Any moralist will tell you that the personal triumph
of an athlete or of a girl at a ball is transitory: the point
is to remember that an empire or a civilisation is also
transitory. All achievements and triumphs, in so far as
they are merely this-worldly achievements and tri-
umphs, will come to nothing in the end. Most scientists
here join hands with the theologians; the earth will not
always be habitable. Man, though longer-lived than
men, is equally mortal. The difference is that whereas
the scientists expect only a slow decay from within, we
reckon with sudden interruption from without at any

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moment. ("What if this present were the world's last
night?")

Taken by themselves, these considerations might
seem to invite a relaxation of our efforts for the good of
posterity: but if we remember that w T hat may be upon
us at any moment is not merely an End but a Judg-
ment, they should have no such result. They may, and
should, correct the tendency of some moderns to talk as
though duties to posterity were the only duties we had.
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror
on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has,
in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injus-
tices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the
benefits which he hopes to confer on future genera-
tions: generations who, as one terrible moment now
reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will
see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to
be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in
the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia
had never been anything but a fantasy.

Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is
certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this pres-
ent" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for
the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and
prudence, is not. For what comes is Judgment: happy
are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations,
whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or
laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years
hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now

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fallen. Those pigs will never In fact be fed, the great
campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyr-
anny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter;
you were at your post when the Inspection came.

Our ancestors had a habit of using the word "judg-
ment" in this context as if it meant simply "punish-
ment": hence the popular expression, "It's a judgment
on him.*' I believe we can sometimes render the thing
more vivid to ourselves by taking judgment in a stricter
sense: not as the sentence or award, but as the Verdict.
Some day (and "What if this present were the world's
last night?") an absolutely correct verdict if you like,
a perfect critique will be passed on what each of us is.

We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on
ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover
what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don't of
course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we
usually have to discount. I am thinking of what
we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions
about us which our neighbours or employees or subordi-
nates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the ter-
rible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by chil-
dren or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bit-
terest or sweetest experiences we have. But of course
both the bitter and the sweet are limited by our doubt
as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope
that those who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are
ignorant and malicious; we always fear that those who
trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I sup-
pose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may

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break in upon us at any moment) will be like these lit-
tle experiences, but magnified to the Nth.

For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable
we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is
wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know
beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted
being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither
more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realise
that in some dim fashion we could have known it all
along. We shall know and all creation will know too:
our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our
children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident
truth about each will be known to all.

1 do not find that pictures of physical catastrophe
that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a
scroll help one so much as the naked idea of Judg-
ment. We cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps,
train ourselves to ask more and more often how the
thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at
each moment will look when the irresistible light
streams in upon it; that light which is so different from
the light of this world and yet, even now, we know
just enough of it to take it into account. Women some-
times have the problem of trying to judge by artificial
light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very
like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for
the electric lights of the present world but for the day-
light of the next. The good dress is the one that will face
that light. For that light will last longer.

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